JULY 2021

    Perhaps the best explanation is that Paul is employing some overstatement; surely accountability did exist before the Law but in no way to the extent and specificity as it did after the giving of the Law. There was perhaps more leniency for pre-Law individuals given the scant revelation that they had. But the Law formalized in commands and consequences the fact that sin exists, that it would be judged, and that, the consequence for sin was death.    Paul returns to his point in v. 14: since the time of Adam’s transgression, sin did reign in his descendants and it maintained an indomitable tyranny over humanity. Even without Mosaic Law, there was still sin, and therefore, death “reigned.” Whereas humanity was created to reign and rule, humanity divested itself of that role and allowed death to become one of the most consistent and dominant realities of human existence.

    Paul specifies that people did not have to sin in the same way that Adam did in order for that sin to have intruded into their lives with the same fatal consequences as it did for Adam. Even though people sin many different kinds of sins, each sin still echoes that first man’s disobedience and rebellion against the Creator’s expectations for His creation. Every thought, motive, affection, joy, is smeared with the stain of sin and with the stench of death.

    Paul says that Adam is a “type” of Christ, a “pattern, example, model, standard.” Adam is the one through whom sin and death spread to all humanity (v. 12). So also, through Christ, the sin problem is defeated and that victory over sin and death is available to all humanity through faith. Paul will get to that point as the passage progresses. However, first, we need to go back to a central issue.

    That issue is the fact that many have adopted a naïve anthropology. They believe that people are fundamentally good, but that humanity has some bad apples in it. Scripture teaches the opposite; sin and death intruded into the human condition and contaminated all people, and it is immature to think otherwise. Many of our political discussions should take this Biblical anthropology into account. For instance, it is naïve to think that passing out resources indiscriminately, such as via our modern welfare system, will make people happier or will make them more inclined to work. In fact, welfare robs human dignity rather than recognizing it. It is naïve to believe that all who want to enter our country through illegal means have only our country’s best interests at heart.

    This is true of Christians, as well. It is naïve to show up every Sunday to church, listen to the preacher, throw in your tithe, and shake some hands, and believe that these acts will mechanically and automatically make you more holy and godly. These are tools for spiritual growth, not automatic means for growth nor metrics for spiritual entitlement. It is simplistic to confuse proximity for growth; there are no coat-tails in Christianity, and spiritual growth doesn’t work by osmosis.

    Christians, too, need to have a less naïve anthropologically and recognize that even though we have been redeemed by God’s grace, we still have the intrusion of the sin nature clinging to our being. If you want to grow spiritually, you need to study and apply God’s Word, you need to pursue God in passionate prayer (not long or wordy prayers, but deep), and have sincere worship with your heart and mind. We need to confess our sins specifically and regularly, we need accountability. We need to be humble and not think too highly of our spiritual place. We need to pursue discipleship through purity, service, and growth in knowledge, always striving upward and onward, “further up and further in” when it comes to faith.

    If we don’t recognize this unwelcome intrusion of transgression in our lives, then we have bought into a way of thinking about people that is as naïve and unhelpful as the views of unbelievers. Also, we risk failing to recognize how hard spiritual growth is, and we may be that much more susceptible to sin, temptation, and backsliding in our own lives.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE: One Woman and Her Blazing World

    More and more people are looking for utopia. We write about it, dream about it, and politicians and pundits promise some kind of utopian future.

    In fact, utopian literature, about an ideal place or time or society, has been very popular, and has discernibly increased since Thomas More wrote his book Utopia in 1516.

    In the last article of this series, we looked at Johannes Valentinus Andreae’s work called Description of the Republic of Christianopolis which was published in 1619 (see our article about this called “A City Based on Christ and Luther” from the October 2017 edition of The Eclectic Kasper). He described stumbling across an isolated and ideal city that was founded on Christian and Lutheran principles, and relatively uncorrupted from the outside world.

    A few years after this, a similar utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon was published posthumously, in 1626, called New Atlantis. This work similarly features European voyagers who stumble upon an island. The society they found on this island promoted Christian and Renaissance principles and promoted the pursuit of knowledge and scientific discovery.

    But another utopian work was written about a half-century after Christianopolis and New Atlantis. In fact, it was far less “Christian,” but it had some unique elements to contribute to the corpus of utopian literature.    Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World was published in 1666 in England, soon after the tumult of the English Civil War (1642–1651) and the instability that ensued. The work is unique for a few reasons. It is unique as a work written by a woman at a time when there were not many female authors. Nicole Pohl notes that The Blazing World “raises questions about women’s education and intellectual perfectibility, scientific paradigms and gender and genre in such a progressive and modern way that Margaret Cavendish was labeled ‘Mad Madge’ by contemporaries” (Pohl, “Utopianism after More: The Renaissance and Enlightenment,” in Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys, 62). Blazing World is also exceptional in that it includes some science-fiction elements way before science fiction was appreciated as a literary category.

    As with Christianopolis and New Atlantis the narrative framework for this utopian work is simple. A small boat carrying a young lady and several mariners is caught up in a tempest and drawn toward the North Pole. The young lady alone survives the shipwreck, is transported via the North Pole to the pole of another planet and subsequently encounters many strange humanoid creatures of various skin colors.

    Eventually, she meets the emperor, who is so smitten with her that he marries her and makes her empress, “and gave her absolute power to rule and govern all that world as she pleased” (Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World and Other Writings, 132). The content of most of this work, then, is a description of this Blazing World, so named for the multitude of stars in its sky, and the empress’s extended scientific and moral discussions with its inhabitants.

    The research that I was doing into these utopian works a few years ago was to see how religion was portrayed in them. Of course, religion is portrayed quite prominently and favorably in Christianopolis, and only slightly less so in New Atlantis.      Religion is not as central to society in The Blazing World as it is in Christianopolis. In fact, the flux and flexibility of religion in Cavendish’s fictional world seem to reflect increasing ambiguity and ambivalence toward organized religion in her day. That makes sense, since she wrote this in 1666, after the brutal religious conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), whereas, the other two utopian works were written toward the beginning of that period.

    The female protagonist ascertains that the Blazing World’s inhabitants worship the same deity despite their different churches and priests. When she becomes empress, she consolidates religion underneath her authority. She preaches from two different chapels, calling hellfire upon the wicked from one and providing comfort for the afflicted from the other. She wins the inhabitants over to her own faith—the specifics of which remain ambiguous—with persuasion and ingenuity rather than compulsion and bloodshed (164). Many discussions about religion contain satirical elements, such as an extended conversation about Cabbalism, a form of Jewish Mysticism. These discussions reflect attitudes about faith that are more searching and contemplative than doctrinally-oriented and dogmatic.

    Like Andreae’s city of Christ, the Blazing World features one religion, and thus, it does not have religious conflicts. Pohl notes that “as its basic principles – one monarch, one language, one religion – attest, it is clearly a reaction to the disruptions of the Civil War in England at the time” (Pohl, “Utopianism after More,” 62). Unlike Christianopolis, conceptions of religion are less transcendent and unalterable, and more fluid and subjective.

    Both Christianoplis and Cavendish’s The Blazing World have a similar story: both feature an individual who suffers a shipwreck, and then solely witnesses the tale’s idyllic society. The story makes the didactic content, specifically, the descriptions of the utopian society, more intriguing; it is far more accessible than a treatise on improved structures for society or government. Narrative stokes the curiosity of the reader as she or he vicariously experiences and learns about different social principles through the narrative’s characters.

    However, Cavendish’s Blazing World reflects a lack of interest in formal religion, whether it is of the Catholic, Reformed, or Luther confessions. Her disregard for these organized forms of Christianity reflect attitudes that would continue to lead to distrust and disillusionment with religion as Europe inched closer and closer to the European Enlightenment.