Acceptance vs. Absolution

I don’t know if any of you are podcasts fans.  The Rest is History is an occasional rabbit hole, and it isn’t a nothing as it boasts 20 million downloads a month.  It is hosted by two decent British Historians – Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook – who together have an easy repour.  Maybe it is because neither has anything left to prove academically, they are both willing to cover “popular” historical eras and they are willing to indulge in what used to be called moralizing. The entire reason history as a subject exists was moralizing. The Greek and the Roman historians wrote so that current and future leaders might emulate the good and avoid the bad. They drew conclusions about their subjects and their times.  Something that fell out of favor among modern academic historians. In a recent work of his, Dominion, Tom Hollard put forward a thesis that is both undeniable and yet shocking to actually state.  Christ changed the world.  Things that Homer or Caesar took for granted as the way of the world were flipped upside down. The Rich Man’s treatment of Lazarus at the time not only would not have been remarkable, it would have been thought appropriate.  It is Christ who commanded the care for the poor, the least, the unfortunate. It is Christ who claimed to be the servant of all.  It is Christ who redeemed suffering.  And as much as someone my age might lament what feels like a complete loss of Christendom, Holland’s book points out just how Christian we all are. The release of the movie The Odyssey this summer had some talk about this. Many Classicists complained that the director Nolan Christianized Odysseus and the story. And Nolan’s reply was rather blunt.  You couldn’t tell it any other way and be understood.  Straight Homer doesn’t make sense to us anymore. Christ flipped the world upside down.

That’s a long introduction to something I’ve been pondering which I think is woven through our lessons this week and that is the concept of sin itself.  I’ll use Freud as the historical marker.  The concept of sin prior to the therapeutic concept was both well developed and personal.  As we say in the corporate confession “we have sinned in thought, word and deed.” And a mere catechism lad could have expounded and identified his sin in textured ways.  And over all of that would be spoken the absolution from the cross and the call to life in the Spirit.  “I lay my sins on Jesus” to “How clear is our vocation Lord when once we heed your call.” That’s the progression in our hymns this week.

But the therapeutic concept pronounces all of that morose. The therapeutic tends to remove personal responsibility and cast blame on social faults and systemic injustice.  At the extreme, sin itself is just the internalization of some oppressor’s unjust rule over you.  They no longer even have to be present because you have internalized their judgements. And the therapist is not present to grant absolution.  The therapist is not there is set you free from your sinful condition by the indwelling of God.  The therapist is present to free you from your own mental shackles. You are good enough, and you have every right to strive for full self-actualization, however you want to do that. And anything that gets in the way, any institution be that Family or Church or State, anything that demands loyalty at the expense of personal expression must be torn down. The therapist is present to pronounce acceptance.

And I can understand the appeal.  Things are not my fault but the fault of impersonal forces beyond me.  I am not the bad person and any bad I feel is just my struggle to be authentically me against the oppressor. I can be who I am without any necessary change and that is just ok.  But here is my problem.  To Hell with acceptance. I know what the authentic me would do.  And I don’t like that guy. And I certainly don’t want to live in the world that looks more like straight Homer. What I need is that absolution. What I need to the Word of God that says this suffering is not meaningless.  As Joseph says to his brothers, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good (Genesis 50:20).” And then brothers can live in harmony and not fear. To the therapist there are no sinners, but the Gospel of Jesus Christ is only for sinners. Jesus sinners doth receive.