Word: sinful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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America, the land of revivalism, has from the start alternated in its view between an awesome Christ and an accessible Christ. In the Calvinism of the original Great Awakening, Jesus was a severe judge; Jonathan Edwards and others emphasized sinful man's utter helplessness before him. In the 19th century revivals of Charles G. Finney and Dwight L. Moody, however, the Lord had become more sympathetic: he began to help those who helped themselves by responding to his grace. Pious white Sunday-school art has since made Jesus into an effete Aryan rather than a rugged Jewish carpenter, but that...
...decade before World War II, liberal Protestant theology in the U.S. had become a stagnant residue of the social gospel. There was an uncritical assumption that the sins of society would be inevitably overcome with education and religious good will; the concept of individual sin was formally acknowledged but widely ignored as a potentially meaningful element in normal life...
Into this comforting, wan world of theological thought came Reinhold Niebuhr, loosing the sobering wind of "Christian realism." Original sin stemming from Adam's fall was to be taken seriously but not literally, said Niebuhr. Man's great sin was willful pride, a universally "entrenched predatory self-interest" that exists in everyone, "benevolent or not." To ignore this basic reality-and man's need to struggle constantly against it-could only lead to moral and political confusion. The individual, Niebuhr contended, cannot excuse his immoral actions by "attributing them to the actions of others, even though there...
...mere realism. Observing that "absolutely millions of people" are mad with "family pride," he concludes that "the only way for them to get humility is through learning they're-you know-beasts." Accordingly, like a Greek mythologist with the heart of a gloomy seminary student, Keneally makes original sin literal by turning Father and Mother Glover into bull and cow from the waist down...
...does a martyr escape from family, from original sin, even from Australia? Like Joyce & Co., Keneally is better at seeing the trap than seeing a way out. "We're cemented, you, me, them," Barbara cries. In the end, Keneally looses a Jehovah-like flood on the outback and the Glovers, washing himself clean of his creation. But in the meantime, writing like an angel, he has forcefully raised an ancient question: What is the demon in man that so often makes him a monster to those condemned to love him-including himself...