Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Luther
The atheist Jean Paul Sartre in his 1943 play The Flies caricatures a Christian moaning in light of his sins.
"I stink…I am a mass of rottenness…I have sinned a thousand times, I am a sink of ordure [obscenity, foulness], and I reek to heaven."
Jupiter/Zeus responds, "O worthy man!"
Sartre had an immediate political message for his people who were grovelling under the jackboots of Hitler's forces and the Vichy French who collaborated with the Nazis. A member of the French Resistance, Sartre called his people to make a commitment and not to live like cows to be herded and milked and slaughtered. He shared with Nietzsche before him a hatred for this sickeningly passive view of life with its "kick-me-again-it's-all-I-deserve" outlook.
The political nature of the play gave Sartre the chance also to express his existential philosophy (which comes close to worshipping "choice"). The difference between a real human and an animal is that the human has the capacity for choice, the capacity to transcend pressures whether from culture or some other outside source. To grovel and to allow others to tell you how to live and what to think, Sartre insisted, is to reject the one thing that makes humans different from animals. If you will not make a personal commitment where do you differ from a donkey?
For this reason and more Sartre was anti-religious and believed that Christianity produced snivelling wimps whose life was sucked out of them by religious authorities. They spoke for "God" and told the people they were all sinners and could do nothing worthy so no wonder all they ever talked about was their sinfulness; and what a pack of crawlers they saw themselves to be, leaving a slimy trail behind them anywhere they went. So the opening quotation speaks to Christians as well as to the French people.
There is something sickening about the way we go on and on about how sinful we are and there is a toxic kind of teaching that would make us believe that when we pour unbridled scorn and derision on ourselves that God responds, "O worthy man!"
T.E. Jessup had a similar point in mind when he repeats the doggerel that made the rounds a few generations ago:
Once in a saintly passion
I cried in deepest grief
O God my heart is filled with guile
Of sinners I'm the chief.
Then came my guardian angel
And whispered from behind,
Vanity my little man
You're nothing of the kind.
I'm thinking not of a healthy confession of our sinfulness but of that pathological obsession with it that paralyses us and keeps us from growth in holiness and vibrant righteousness. I'm including the belief (promoted by the ignorant) that we're not taking our sins seriously if we don't bleat and moan ceaselessly about the evil within us. The truth is we take our sins most seriously when we reflect on the cross of Jesus and truly commit to its meaning rather than inwardly and constantly rehearsing our sins in all their gory details. It's only in the cross that the world's great wrongs are taken with the seriousness with which they deserve. But isn't it astonishing that He who takes our sins more seriously than we can imagine doesn't go on and on and on about them, but speaks forgiveness and then issues a call to vibrant righteousness, to moving on and forgetting the past? This unending whinging over our sins, this culture of confessing how evil we are can become addictive, a perverse pleasure.
Sartre has it right when he has a character say, "Clytemnestra is indulging in our national pastime, the game of public confession. Here everyone cries his sins on the housetops.... So you can imagine her delight when she finds someone like you, someone raw and young, who doesn't even know her name, to hear her tale of guilt. A marvellous opportunity! It's as if she were confessing for the first time."
It's more than potentially addictive—it's potentially boring; even we the confessors can find it boring and so we're tempted to embellish and exaggerate to make it more interesting and easier to tell. A pox on it! And a pox on all teaching that leads us to believe that we should be obsessed with our sins. All our talk is wasted on those who care nothing for holiness and all those who are sensitive to every little thing that wounds the Master's heart don't need our religious nagging even if we're throwing in verses here and there that disguise the truth that we're nagging. There are poor souls who are ill and part of their illness is that they can't stop acting as though they were God, punishing themselves without ceasing. They sneer at every good and wholesome thought that comes into their minds—"You have your nerve to think such things—you, who only last week were…" They jeer at themselves every time they purpose to be involved in a worthy cause or speak a word for God. "Aren't you the perfect hypocrite? Do you think that will make up for…?" These sad souls need lots of help but whatever else they need they need to come to know that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not the Jupiter/Zeus of The Flies. He has no pleasure in endless self-despising.
If you are able—get up and move on, passionately follow the dream God has set in your heart of a glad-hearted righteousness and on the way to it, as Luther has taught us: Sin boldly!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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