Thor’s Day

There is a crack, a crack in everything …

It’s Thor’s Day, when we traditionally honor the storm god here by unleashing the lightning of a robust, but hopefully civil, flamewar.

One of the first questions when approaching the subject of human nature tends to be are we essentially good or essentially rotten? The Christian answer — “Yes!” — can seem like a cop-out, or a contradiction, or a paradox (the euphemism theologian’s use for those contradictions we like). The idea is that every human is of inestimable worth, bearing the very image of God through and through. Yet every human is also fallen, broken, corrupt, through and through.* And the matter of virtue and wickedness is only part of the equation anyway — we’re not just fallen, but also finite, fallible and fragile.**

Just in case Augustinian anthropology isn’t inflammatory enough for a Thursday, let’s add politics. This Christian understanding of human nature is particularly compatible with Madisonian democracy. The people all, equally, deserve and intrinsically possess inviolable rights because every person is of inestimable worth. Yet no person is virtuous enough to be trusted with unchecked power. We cannot trust in the benevolence of a philosopher king, so our leaders — not rulers, but leaders — must be subject to checks and balances and to the will of the sovereign people. Yet even the sovereignty of the people must be checked and balanced by those aforementioned rights so that the majority does not begin to tyrannize the minority/ies.

(This view of human nature also suggests the wisdom of an economic framework that avoids either the potential tyranny of a centrally planned economy or the potential tyranny of unregulated — and therefore not perpetually free — free markets.)

What I’ve never understood about Neocon foreign policy is why these people think the Madisonian system of checks and balances is necessary domestically, but not internationally. Their argument is basically that America is a benevolent country and therefore ought to be the unrivaled, unchecked superpower/philosopher king of the world. No, thank you. No kings, domestic or international.

(Let’s see, theology, politics, economics, foreign policy — not bad for a Thursday. I should probably have included something about sex, gender, Ron Paul and Cloverfield, too, but this should at least get the fireworks started …)

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* The “total” in Calvin’s term “total depravity” means something more like “pervasive.” He was countering the idea that our fallenness was located in one particular aspect or another of ourselves, such as the idea that it is our physical bodies that are wicked, or our “will” (whatever that is), or our genitals, or whatever. Every aspect of every person, in total, is both inherently good and fallen, both in need of redemption and worthy of it.

** “It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.” — Good Omens. It might displease Messrs. Gaiman and Pratchett to hear me say so, but there’s some fine theology in that book.