Prometheus vs. Adam

I spent yesterday evening with a group of young adults discussing, among other things, what it actually means to love our neighbours. Do any of us go as far as Jesus wants us to? Or even come close? Do we love enough or as well or as consistently as we ought to? Do we serve or give or help or deny ourselves in meaningful ways? Or do we just become increasingly skilled at making excuses for why we don’t do more?  At one point, I think I said something predictably uninspiring, something that seemed to reek of middle-aged resignation and cynicism. Well, give all that a decade. Sounds like a recipe for burnout to me.

I disliked the words even as they were coming out of my mouth. Why pour cold water on this youthful idealism and enthusiasm? Does not the world need this kind of passion? Would not the church be greatly energized and improved by people earnestly asking questions about whether or not we are doing what Jesus said well enough, about whether our loves are being properly channelled in the world? I quickly backtracked from my initial comment. Yes, of course we should always be holding our lives up to the mirror of Christ’s teaching, Christ’s example, Christ’s commandments. God help us and God help the church if we ever stop pushing and prodding in these directions.

And yet I’m also just bold enough to imagine that there might also a bit of wisdom that comes with age. I’ve spent a handful of decades at least trying to do what Jesus said. Like everyone else who attempts such a thing, I’ve realized that my best efforts still come up woefully short. A sinner I stubbornly remain. A sinner I will be until I die.

Somehow, we have to make peace with this even as we stretch out toward making Christ more at home in our hearts and in our lives. I have seen many people grind themselves into the ground trying to follow Jesus in ever more earnest ways. I have seen people crippled by guilt, hounded by an unrelenting sense of their own inadequacy. I have seen the best moral intentions and energies go badly wrong. I have seen people become miserable to be around, incapable of experiencing anything resembling joy or contentment, so haunted are they by the unmet need, the untended wound, the unaddressed injustice, the unresolved crisis.

This morning, I spent some time in Charles Mathewes’ The Republic of Grace. I was drawn to a chapter called “Love in the Age of Millennial Capitalism” where he has this to say on the nature of our moral striving and how we should think about it:

“Virtue” has traditionally had dangerously agonistic and heroic connotations, and it seems gravitationally attracted toward understanding moral improvement as an achievement of the agent. Augustinians see this traditional understanding as undergirding and motivating the Pelagian temptation to imagine that we able to be good on our own—which they see more deeply still as reflecting a deep unbelief that God actually be as good as Augustinians understand the Gospels to make God out to be—to seeks us out and help us, in what looks like (to ancient eyes) an undignified manner deeply unfitting to the Ruler of the Universe. But, Augustinians affirm, only grace can save us—and so we must change our perception of ourselves from Promethean to Adamic.

Insofar as we want to use the language of virtue, then, we must do so with profound care. The basic way we should use it is to transform it from a gymnastic language of achievement to a medical language of suffering, of being willing to be shaped (not to shape ourselves) by the medicine of a gracious God.

Are we Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods? Or are we Adam, the one who reached beyond his creaturely limits, who sought to be God instead of a human being? Are we the moral heroes of the story, perfectible with the right investment of effort and creativity and desire? Or is there a more tragic nature to our moral striving, a fundamentally disordered shape that all our efforts eventually take? Are we thieves from the hand of a miserly deity or wayward children of  a loving father?

Over the course of my adult life, my theological trajectory has been toward a more Augustinian view of virtue. I’m not against moral striving, I just know that it will always take place within profound limits. I suppose you could say I have moved from the gymnasium to the hospital, to borrow Mathewes language above. I have come to realize that it is not simply the case that I do not follow Jesus as well as I ought to. It’s also that I cannot. A more strenuous moral regimen might do me some good, but it won’t get me the whole distance. I need the medicine of a gracious God.