In Our Time - Redemption

Episode Date: March 13, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss redemption. In St Paul's letter to the Galatians, he wrote: "Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery". This conception of Redemption as freedom from bondage is crucial for Judeo-Christian thought. In Christianity, the liberation is from original sin, a transformation from the Fall to salvation - not just for mankind but for individual human beings. The content of that journey is moral, gaining redemption by becoming better.So why is the idea of transformation so appealing to human beings? To what extent were Christian views of Redemption borrowed from Judaism? How did philosophers such as Marx reinterpret the concept of Redemption and can redemption retain its value in a world without God? Does its continuing power signify a deep psychological need in humankind?With Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford; Janet Soskice, Reader in Modern Theology and Philosophical Theology at Cambridge University; Stephen Mulhall, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Oxford University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In St. Paul's letter to the Galatians, he wrote, Christ has set us free. Stand fast, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

This conception of redemption as freedom from bondage is crucial for Judeo-Christian thought. In Christianity, the liberation is from original sin, a transformation from fallenness to salvation, not just for mankind but for individual human beings. The content of that journey is moral, gaining redemption by becoming better. So why is the idea of transformation so appealing to human beings? To what extent were Christian views of redemption

borrowed from Judaism? How did thinkers such as Marx and Freud reinterpret the concept of redemption and can redemption retain its value in a world without God? Does its continuing power signify a deep psychological need in mankind? With me to discuss redemption is the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harris, Janet Soskis, reader in philosophical theology at Cambridge University, and Stephen Mulhall, fellow and tutor in philosophy, at Oxford University. Richard Harris, can you explain exactly as exactly as you can

what we mean by Christian redemption? Well, in the Hebrew scriptures, there's a great sense of pain and anguish about human life and a longing that God would intervene to put right everything that is wrong where he would overcome evil and vindicate the good and Christians believed from the word go that this time had dawned that in Jesus God was acting

to vindicate the good to overcome evil and they believe that the consummation of that process would be very soon when it would be revealed and all would be radiant, if you like, of the glory and the beauty and the love of God revealed in Jesus, and everything that was evil and nasty would simply be overcome. Now, they explored that in various metaphors about that as the heart of it,

and they believed that through faith in Jesus Christ, the people who put their faith in Him would, as it were, come through this testing, purging process to eternal life, conceiving. in various ways. Sometimes on this earth, sometimes beyond space and time, sometimes not quite sure whether it's on this earth or beyond space and time, but in some sense, in eternal life with God. So you're saying in brief that this idea came about because of the pressure of a conviction that the world was coming to an end? I think at the heart of it is a feeling that something

somewhere along the line in human history has gone tragically and dramatically wrong. to put it in more theological terms, that human life is, as it were, estranged or alienated from God. And therefore, only God himself can act to put things right. So the great longing begins in the Hebrew scripture, the Christian conviction is that this time has begun to happen, that somehow God, his kingdom, his rule has broken into this world. Janice, what sort of condition of life did this belief imply?

Why did we need to be redeemed? What did it say about human nature, this idea? Well, I think that what Richard has been talking about relates to quite specific circumstances as well as to human nature in general. You've got to remember the Jewish. The first Christians were Jews. It always needs to be said again and again.

And Israel was under the Roman yoke. It was a very bad time. There were a lot of martyrs, and they were looking for a savior. And their religion had held a promise of the Savior. So it wasn't just as it was. were private angst. It was also a social feeling of enslavement and so on. But the idea was, as it seems to me, that you have to be redeemed, you have to be set free

from the nature you have, you have to be made better because you were born and brought up in original sin, the idea that you were a fallen person from the start. No, I think that actually comes in later. I think that most would agree that really a strong formulation of original sin comes in in Western Christianity, in the fourth century, with Augustine. The earlier notions, if I take it back, you mentioned in your initial remarks that this is part of Judaism, and Richard has mentioned that the Christians explored their understanding with a lot of metaphors. They talked about going from darkness into light, from death into being born again. And redemption is clearly based on a metaphor of redeeming a

slave. We still use this kind of language. You redeem a mortgage. You redeem something pond, I think. Not that I've ever pawned anything. And so here you've got this idea of coming from slavery. Now, initially, I think that comes in the Hebrew Bible. Not with the creation of Israel and some idea of a fallen condition. It comes when you'll remember the Jewish people are in Egypt under captivity and Moses is called upon by God to set my people free. So that's the first big story of redemption on which so many later Jewish and Christian stories are modeled. Does that story of redemption apply to a specific people and to a people more than to individuals everywhere?

I think initially it does because initially it's not to do, I don't think it's there to do with the idea that they were sinning. I mean, Israel is represented in its own story as being wayward and straying, but it isn't as though they're in Egypt because they've sinned. they're in Egypt, they're in captivity and God loves these people. He's chosen these people and he's going to free these people. Now, with a Christian message, this is expanded out to be a message of redemption for all people. Again, one has to say that's got a very Jewish base too because the problem to the proposal, God's proposal to Abraham, who is the first Jews it were, the first one who's called by God, is I'm going to make you a mighty people. people and you'll be a source of blessing for all the peoples of the world so that the early Christian movement, which is Jewish, sees itself, it seems to me, is expanding this blessing for all the peoples of the world. So it's an expansion of what becomes as initially rather local to the Jews, but as it's expanded it, they think, at this climactic moment to all peoples.

Could I just add a little point there. I think what Janet is saying is very much reinforced, if you look at the pictures in the catacombs in Rome, the images there are all of, of deliverance. You have Daniel in the Lions Day, and you have the three boys in the fiery furnace, you have pictures of the exodus. And we don't get the first picture of Christ being crucified on the cross until about 420.

So the early images were of this dramatic deliverance, which as Janet said, first of all, is about the Israeli people, but Israel people. But then after that, it is for humanity as a whole. But nevertheless, as Janet said in about the 4th century through Augustine, the idea of being delivered out of bondage, and we're starting with Moses and going through as you're Ashab Pishak and bending and all that

turned into the idea of being redeemed from the fall, isn't it, from the idea of original sin. Can you talk us through that part, though Stephen Mulholy? Well, there is quite a big difference between a general idea that there might be some need for transformation in the individual human personality and the idea of redemption. I mean, I think the notion of transformation is a kind of very familiar aspect of human experience.

in at least two different senses. In one sense, I think most people, sooner or later, come to recognize the degree to which the possibilities that are open to them in their life have always already been limited and conditioned in various ways. You know, no one asks to be born. They're born into a particular family, a particular parental structure,

a particular moment in time and history, a particular social class, a particular culture. And as it were, the more experience you accumulate, the more the sense grows that as you have less and less room for maneuver. So part of the appeal of a general notion of transformation is the idea that you can achieve a completely clean slate. You can just begin again as if you weren't a fundamentally conditioned being. And again, the second sense I had in mind was another but related dimension of moral experience, really.

I mean, I think most of us are familiar with a picture of ourselves as making incremental progress. You know, we know there are things that we do wrong and we try to put them right case by case. Sometimes we make progress. Sometimes we go wrong. But there are other moments and moods and states we find ourselves in when we feel not so much that there are particular things we do wrong,

but that everything that we do is wrong in some way. That we've just, as it were, systematically lost our way, a kind of disorientation in the way Dante finds himself in the middle of a dark wood. Or Thoreau talks about people leading lives of quiet desperation. And what you feel that you need there is not incremental progress, doing better than you did before, but some notion of rebirth or conversion.

That, I think, is a fairly general structure of human experience. But you need something rather more specific to get to an idea of redemption, particularly if the notion of how one is redeemed has to do with a particular kind of sacrifice that God makes through himself. And particularly when what you take yourself to be redeemed from is human nature understood as a certain kind of intrinsically fallen aspect of the natural world more generally.

And that is a specific idea that, as Janet was saying, gets built into Christianity at a relatively late stage with Augustine. Richard Hatch, the idea of original sin, people, as time went on, and let's move to the 18th century rather smartly founded, something that they finally disagreed with. They thought it was the wrong description of human nature. They thought that human being started off as innocent and benevolent

and not as full of sin and guilt. Can you talk about the tension that that brought into theology in the 18th century? Well, it certainly brought a great deal of tension in, and I think I would want to say that those Enlightenment thinkers who took that point of view are actually wrong. I read recently, Melanie Phillips described herself now as a liberal who's been mugged by reality. I think I would want to say that Christians are liberals who've always been aware of reality. And that reality is the tragic nature of human existence,

the way that everything is flawed by evil. There's a seed of evil in everything that is good. And although people find this a gloomy doctrine, in some ways it's a liberating doctrine because it actually brings you up against reality for the first. you know that reality is not your fault, and, of course, Christianity does offer some redemption for it. Stephen Mulho, could you take up that point that Richard Harris has made? Because when I said the Enlightenment idea of innocence and benevolence,

he said, well, he disagreed with it, absolutely fair enough. But they were very strong about this, and yet they too found attention. If we were Rousseau and if we were innocent, if we were noble savages, where did this badness come from? Where did this even, we could use the word evil, come from? There was attention there, wasn't there? Yes, and this I think is one of the paradoxes of human moral experience generally

that the doctrine of original sin at least addresses. And what it takes seriously is the idea that on the one hand, we think of ourselves as free beings, morally responsible, capable of being held accountable for the choices of good and evil that we make. But we also have a sense in our experience that somehow we've always already gone wrong in some way. And the doctrine of original sin, in part, is the argument of original sin, in part, is the argument. idea that through the exercise of freedom we lose our freedom. And not all the, well, it depends on how you call the Enlightenment,

but not all the early modern thinkers. We're all that optimistic about the human condition. If you think of Hobbes, for instance, the war of all against all. And some of these pictures are scarcely more positive. Even Darwinism, when it becomes nature red and tooth and claw, is not really very optimistic picture of the human condition. So I think we can make too much about how. gloomy Christianity was. We forget these same people also built short and preached wonderful

sermons about love and glory and beauty and so. I agree we can make us that too easily. But of course good novels aren't made out of talk about the happy bits of Catholicism. They're made out of talking about the grim bits. Did the waning, a certain waning of Christianity in parts of the Western world among an intellectual community, did that waning lead to secular philosophies which have in some way replaced Christianity? Well, I think it's more than just a coincidence that really you only begin to get a real dispersal of Christian

conviction amongst the intellectuals in the 19th century. And at that time, you see the emergence of a number of different secular narratives of salvation. You think of many of the great theories of the 19th century. Marxism is a narrative of salvation with a story with an end, aspirational.

Darwinism, similarly, particularly when it becomes kind of an ideology, and not just a scientific theory. And Freudianism in the 20th century, all of these are kind of narrative, secular narratives of salvation, with narrative components. And I can't think that's totally an accident,

that maybe there's something about the human mind that grasps a narrative solution that wants this idea of going from psychic imprisonment to psychic liberation or animal imprisonment to animal liberation or whatever. It is just an interesting phenomenon. And I think we still hang on to these, or at least, as I read once,

we now have the floor scrapings of all these ideologies that we try to push together and make compatible with a world largely driven by advertising. Yeah, I mean, I think that what that brings out is a truth which is explored in so many novels and is lived out in so many lives, that the quest to be good, the quest to be morally virtuous

can sometimes be very self-defeating because of the extraordinary mixture of human motives, which is part of all of us. I mean, I love Nick Hornby's novel How to Be Good, and I think that brings that out in a very stark kind of way. You have a very good, loving GP, who's the kind of authorial voice of it, who thinks of herself as a good person, and her finds her whole life going to pieces.

Church going, I have to say, in that novel, is not fought forward as a very satisfactory option. It ends on rather a note of bleak despair. But again, like so many novels, it brings out the sheer difficulty of the pursuit of moral, virtue for its own sake, which again from a Christian point of view, highlights the need for something beyond ourselves to bring us into a new relationship with that reality. Janet, you can't say.

The only other that I see in the marketplace of ideas today that seems to have some kind of hold is a kind of crude Darwinism, where we are these kind of driven animals who are always going around trying to maximize our genetic potential or something

like this. And I think that kind of selfish gene theory, again, it's a narrative theory, a particularly aggressive one. Like, as Mary Midgley said, it makes human life sound like a bad day on the New York Stock Exchange. And it is nonetheless the only contender out there. And it's a very grim picture of human life, and one, of course, in which the weak fall by the wayside. And one which I think most people don't want to embrace morally. So we really need to find, as it were, a secular anthropology to deliver, what is this new picture of the

human being going to look like. How can we really get rid of Christianity? Unless, as Richard is saying quite brightly as a bishop, well, maybe we should look again at religious faith. I don't think it's any one Darwinism. There are three others I can think of, two of which you mention yourself. There's Marxism, where Marx and Engels talk in the same imagery as the

Old Testament, released from change. But it's the proletariat. It's the whole world who will be released. It's being led out of Ur, led to Canaan. So that's a Marxism is a really... Freud, we haven't talked. you're about, the analyst becomes God unlocks the uncontrollable and the unassailable, the unconscious

and you're freed by that. And then consumerism, which is here, and it's where you're fulfilled by getting lots of things. And the more things you get, the sort of happier you're supposed to be. Now that isn't at all very brief, elliptical and crude. But those three things are around. I don't think it's

just Darwinism. Well, certainly the first two, I think, or certainly the first has gone, let us put it this way, rather deader than it was in the 1960s. until the early 70. Yes, Marxism. I mean, at that time, there was a very, very strong sense that actually perhaps life could be radically changed for the better.

But all that seemed to have died and died a decade or two of now. I mean, I think it's a pity that that kind of desperate passion for a better world actually seems to have gone out and certainly gone out with most students now. They're not, as they were in the 1960s. In the United States part of the world you're in. I mean, I was in India last week. He hasn't gone out in India. I mean, the Calcutta Communist part of, for instance,

is trying to get a lot of people to do. have a much better life. There's still a fundamentally optimistic strand of Enlightenment thinking in Marx because although he does indeed identify the problems of society and the problems that individuals might face within that social life, as

as it were, structural. It's not just accidental that certain kinds of oppression and exploitation repeat themselves in human society according to Marx. On the other hand, he thinks that the structures are of a nature such that collective human effort can put them right. I mean, it might

need a revolution of some kind, but if the right revolutionary class achieve the right kind of position in history, then it's perfectly possible to do that. And I think that misses out a sense of the kind of structural perversity of human nature that certain Christian ideas attempt to capture, and also certain non-Christian ones. I'm just going to go back to your list of three alternatives to the Darwinian. Consumerism doesn't seem to me to be a runner, just because it's not clear what as it were, shopping redeems you from. Unsatisfied desires, perhaps,

but there's nothing intrinsically misdirected or perverse about those desires. Freud is a much more interesting case, and I think can be brought much more closely into association with other ideas and traditions, more in the French and German philosophical traditions, perhaps than the English and American, but figures like Sartre or Heidegger, people who have an interest in existentialism and phenomenology,

these people share with Freud a sense that there's something about the process of the constitution of human personality that misdirects it. And a sense of absence, a sense of absences and failings. Yeah, but not just, as it were, accidentally. You know, when Freud comes across various examples of psychotic neurotic behavior, behavior that's in a variety of ways, pathological, his explanation for the prevalence of that is not, as it were, contingent. It's not just that various things that might easily be put right cause.

these perversities and pathologies. It's more that, as it were, the process by which a human infant becomes a human individual in the context of the family is such that the structures of subjectivity are put together in a particular way that almost inevitably generates problems of various kinds. Could I put in a word for consumerism or against it, or just at least here's a thesis, Stephen,

that the thing about the way Freudianism has gone is we've increasingly medicalized things that are wrong. And here we need to remember that redemption is often associated with sickness, and perhaps sickness is what has replaced the ancient feeling of sin. But we're very much more likely to say a child behaves badly because they had a disruptive childhood than to say they did wrong. And that in a way is good, but it is also to medicalize everything and to suggest that something, especially increasingly,

that certain childhood illnesses can be treated by calming drugs and this kind of thing. So we medicalize everything, so we make ourselves into a kind of animal, and here's where there's perhaps a fusion with neo-Darwinism, we're a kind of animal that can be sedated into happiness by a combination of drugs, a reasonable quality of life, not thinking about things too much, the right television programs, and buying things. And this is a very happy circle for anyone who wants to sell things, of course, too.

So I think that there is. Consumerism, I'm probably more a consumer than you are, but I think in a sense, consumerism does fit into this rather reductionist view of a human being is basically just an animal with needs and greeds and you feed them and then it has another greed and feed it again. I mean, I think of the three alternatives you mention Marxism, consumerism and Freudism and Freudianism, I think the most powerful over the last hundred years has actually been Freudianism and all that has sprung from it. I mean, Herman Hessa said that when a person tries to fulfill themselves, they're doing the highest thing they can do. And I think that kind of ideology has permeated so much of the way that the whole of Western society looks at life. And it seems to me that a Christian perspective will want to look at that and pose the question, well, what is this self which is to be fulfilled? And in any way, how do we find fulfillment?

suspect a lot of the people who pursue self-fulfillment or self-expression as the ultimate goal of human life actually find themselves in all kinds of ways dissatisfied without trying really, without really being able to solve the problem as to why they're feeling dissatisfied. So I think that Freudism all things from it offers out the hope of some kind of redemption. I think it is probably ultimately unsatisfying. Yes, and also there's a generalisation about Freudism, which Janet touched on as she went through it, that, you know, unhappy childhood equals X. But you instantly say, well, the other

14 people are near enough unhappy childhood, and that equals AB3 C, D and E. You know, Hitler loved his mother. Well, lots of people love their mothers. You go on and on, on like that. It gets you somewhere, but there's a feeling that it doesn't get you far enough. But the difference I was trying to get at

between stories which suggest that the causes of trouble, the causes of, let's say, evil-doing or misery and unhappiness in human life, are specific, identifiable and remediable, such that, as it were, some people have unhappy childhoods, but a happy childhood is perfectly possible. And if we address the causes of the unhappiness

in a given individual's childhood, then we may solve that particular problem. That's one possibility. And, of course, there are certain versions of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy on the market, particularly in America, which take that kind of attitude, the kind of medical attitude that Janet was identified.

We can be engineered towards happiness and form of it. That's right. But there's another way of taking Freud, another way of taking various other thinkers in the sort of post-enlightenment era, which says it's not that, as it were, having an unhappy childhood causes the problem, it's just having a childhood that causes the problem. It's the fact that everybody has parents or parental figures. And those are the, as it were, the authority figures that one interjects and that partly constitute one sense of oneself as an individual.

And you can't, as it were, go back and tinker with that. But it's the difference between the idea that there's something structurally awry with the human condition, with the ways in which human individuals actually come to be individuals, and thinking that, as it were, given the way human beings are, there are various things they do wrong, which might be able, at least in principle, to be put right.

And I think the way in which the Christian idea of redemption has been preserved, although of course transformed in various ways, both in the Enlightenment and immediately after, is the retention of that sense, that there's something structurally intrinsically perverse or misdemeanor. directed or disoriented about human nature as such.

What gets lost is the idea that there's some very clear-cut solution to that problem. If one loses the sense of a divine or transcendent source of help, and yet one describes the human situation or condition in such terms that it makes it intrinsically perverse, how is one supposed to get beyond that? How are you supposed to get beyond that, Janet Tuskis? We're our teachings of the philosophy of theology. Well, it's very interesting. I, as you would imagine,

I'm quite disposed to the idea that we really do need God and that there's something in these ancient wisdoms that you're turning on the wrong way, you're going the wrong way, and then as Augustine finds he turns and finds a better way to go. And I think what Stephen has diagnosed is there is a certain moment of, you can, exaggerated, but there's a certain moment of cultural despair to do with what we call

postmodern or the late modern period, that a lot of these optimistic ventures of the Enlightenment have failed. We seem to have a rather negative anthropology with no psychic way out. So the idea that there could be some restoration that you could make a move that wouldn't be totally satisfactory because even within the Christian picture of things you're still misguided and fallen, but unless you're turning towards the light, you're trying to come to some kind of a new relationship with God

and thus with your fellow men and women and with the whole created order. That's got a great deal going for it. That's why a number of... It's interesting that a number of philosophers are becoming more interested in theology again these days, whether personally or just theoretically, it's sometimes hard to tell,

because it does offer a number of solutions for which it's not obvious, but other way they'll be resolved. I'm going to ask you, we've sort of left God out of this discussion this morning. He has very rarely been mentioned. Janet's mentioning of him actually brought me back. He gets in the interstices.

He's most convincing when he gets in the interstice. This is your last chance. We're coming to an end here. I mean, every film, every novel, every police, endless police, drama on the television brings home the fact that something fundamentally has gone wrong that human life is tragic and flawed.

The challenge from the Christian point of view is to put forward in convincing and authentic ways that there is actually some kind of hope of redemption and it's very, very difficult to do. Some novelists did it, William Golding, I think, did it in the darkness visible. Patrick White and the writers in the chariot. Shusiko Endo does it with his novels in Japan.

But I think that today we're so suspicious of any kind of happy ending that wonderful, lapidary statement of Ariz Murdoch, everything that consoles is fake. It's gone very deep into our psyche. And for Christians actually to convey the fact that they've got some good news is very difficult because we're so suspicious of any kind of a happy ending. That's the real time.

We've got every right to be suspicious, aren't we? We have. We have. But why should everything that consoles be fake? That's an unprovable assumption. Got to stop. Unprovable assumption will do. Thank you all very much indeed. and we'll talk next week.

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