When we speak of natural theology, we have in mind the ways in which we can know—on our own, as it were—something about God. We see a sunset, or think about the order of the universe, or we are stirred to service, and these seem to be inklings or vestiges of God’s presence. They are not proofs, nor do they answer the question about who this God might be and what he wants of us. Natural theology ought to be modest but hopeful nonetheless. It points toward the possibility of the good creation and so the Creator.
There is, however, another kind of intuition, that of a crack running through it, of something rotten, not just here or there, but throughout Denmark and from its origin. This intuition of the Fall, of original sin, is the obverse of that more hopeful intuition. It too offers no proof—it might be that all is only sound and fury, might is indeed right, and a frozen night our destiny, so that we who hope are most to be pitied (so Leonard Cohen, Shakespeare, Thucydides, and Paul, in that order). Still, this can suggest the plausibility of another part of the Christian narrative. One might say that it is a kind of negative natural theology, in which the object is not the creation, but rather its corruption, since even this suggests something antedating the ruin.
To be sure, this sense that “the fix is in” can go to bad places. While it might fill out a picture of paradise lost, it can also become the steppingstone to great wrong. My ancestors in New England, and their wrestling with their questions of theodicy, ended up on occasion with burning witches. There may be a negative natural theology, but it is incumbent on those with such a sense to proceed to the following ancillary conclusions.
First, they share the rot. Nathan tells David, incensed at injustice, “You are the man.” Likewise Oedipus is determined to find the malhombre who has polluted Thebes.
Second, we Christians insist that even the worst blight is never total. In Nazi Germany there were righteous Gentiles. Soviet Russia had the Gulag, but it had Sakharov too. We in the end are not Manicheans.
Third, we affirm the tradition of total depravity. This does not mean the world is depraved without remainder (see point 2), but it does mean that no part of us is utterly exempt from the corruption. The aliens, once in the airducts, can get everywhere, even our art, poetry, philosophy. Perhaps the greatest philosopher of the last century proved himself, in the moment of truth, to be a Nazi (Heidegger).
So by “total depravity” we mean that the rot reaches everywhere (though it is not everything). This will dovetail well with the subsequent Christian claim that only a Savior, and one performing vicarious atoning work, will do. It is only with this additional affirmation that we can say that “total depravity” is entailed in the good news. (It also means that our political theology should tilt in an Augustinian direction toward the restraint of power, and toward the legal rights of individuals).
Where is all this coming from? Like most of America, I have been reading about the recent Epstein controversy (depraved indeed). More specifically, I listened to the conversation on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast with an investigative reporter named Will Sommer, who has studied conspiracy theories in general and QAnon in particular. (The interview shows how the worldview of QAnon informed MAGA’s interest in Epstein). The interlocutors make the pertinent observation that even truly bonkers theories come from a context with some explanatory power (the COVID lockdown and the virus’s shadowy origins) and often contain a grain of truth (the outrageously generous plea Epstein got in Florida, and the odd failure to maintain his suicide watch). These at least help us see how conspiracy theories get going.
But my interest in the interview lies elsewhere. You don’t need to adhere to such extreme notions to believe that, in some sense, the social, political, and economic system is rigged. Modern social science has been a long exercise in, as the saying goes, “following the money,” and comes to this conclusion of corruption. Those who suppose that an angry vanquishing of the bad actors will bring us straightway to the big rock-candy mountain are strange cousins of Marxists. Classic liberalism’s answer is that deliberate action is required, to some limited extent, to un-tilt the table. The libertarian retort falls down with the willingness of moneyed interests to take and hold unfair advantage (a recent tax bill comes to mind).
Let us put the matter another way. Traditional Christianity is not to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. For its origin story is older, deeper, and more comprehensive than these impostors. But we do believe that malign forces have corrupted the social order (original sin, the powers), and that a great deal of energy is put into concealing this fact (the role of ideology). With original sin comes our proclivity to idolatry, i.e., the formation of a truncated version of the Fall story, one which supposes that some lesser agent, other than God, can resolve our predicament.
Conspiracy theories may be obscure, but my point is not. Nor is it original to me. In our post-Christian society, political allegiance often amounts to religion, complete with its own Savior, Fall, and body of the faithful (in our case, of a weird, disembodied online type). Such epistemic systems finally, and then quickly, fall, but only after a great deal of damage. In the meantime, there is surely an evangelistic opening for the true, and hopeful, account of the world’s pervasive distortion, together with a better end to the story of humankind’s travail.
The Rt. Rev. George Sumner, Ph.D. is the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. Ordained in Tanzania in 1981, he served in cross-cultural ministry in Navajoland, led parishes in New England, and from 1999-2015 was Principal of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. He is the author or co-author of several books, including The First and The Last: The Claim of Jesus and The Claims of Other Religions (Eerdmans, 2004) and a commentary on Esther and Daniel (Brazos, 2013).
