I recently stumbled across this provocative quote from George Bernard Shaw:
“What you yourself can suffer is the utmost that can be suffered on earth. If you starve to death you experience all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be. If ten thousand other women starve to death with you, their suffering is not increased by a single pang: their share in your fate does not make you ten thousand times as angry, nor prolong your suffering ten thousand times. Therefore do not be oppressed by “the frightful sum of human suffering”: there is no sum: two lean women are not twice as lean as one nor two fat women twice as fat as one. Poverty and pain are not cumulative: you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that it is. If you can stand the suffering of one person you can fortify yourself with the reflection that the suffering of a million is no worse: nobody has more than one stomach to fill nor one frame to be stretched on the rack.”
This quote rings true to me and it resonates with many scriptures. In the parable of the lost sheep, Jesus suggests that one lost sheep is as important as the entire rest of the flock. In the strange mathematics of heaven, two sheep are not greater than one sheep. Accumulation has no meaning in divine judgement. God judges a single individual as if she were the whole, and the whole as if it were the single individual.
A seminary teacher of mine once told me that Christ would have gone through the atonement even if it was for me alone and no one else, down to every last drop of blood. At the time, I remember strongly objecting to this idea. It was simply too intimate for me to comprehend. Nevertheless, such is the nature of God’s love for the individual.
The Holocaust
George Bernard Shaw’s idea that “there is no sum” has some profound implications. Sarah Silverman has an perversely hilarious skit on the holocaust where she cracks this joke:
My niece called me up and she’s like, “Aunt Sarah, did you know that Hitler killed 60 million Jews?” I corrected her, and I said, “You know I think he’s responsible for killing six million Jews.” And she says, “Oh, yeah. Six million. I knew that. But seriously, auntie, what’s the difference?” “The difference is that 60 million is UNFORGIVABLE, young lady.”
If Hitler had only sent one Jew to die in a gas chamber, would we care? Is the death of one more horrible than the death of many? George Bernard Shaw suggests that whether we kill six, six million, or 60 million, on some level, it is the same.
The Holocaust was a terrible event that was responsible for a great collective loss of faith. Many of those who survived became atheists because they could not believe in a God who would allow such a thing to happen. Yet from the beginning of time to this very day, various individuals around the world are suffering their own private holocausts. Their suffering may not be as obvious to others, but depending on their own resilience or lack thereof, these private holocausts can be as traumatic as anything experienced in the death camps.
As good-hearted, religious Americans, we sometimes feel far removed from the evils of those camps. We would never have done something like that. Yet when it comes to interrogating terror suspects, religious people in the US are far more likely to approve of torture as an interrogation technique than non-religious people. To be fair, this could simply be because religious people are more likely to be Republican, and Republicans are more likely to support torture. But still, in the economy of heaven, would God really approve of the torture of only a few Muslim terror suspects any more than he might approve of the torture of many more Jews in German concentration camps? Are we really that far removed from the Nazis?
The Death Penalty
We all know that occasional mistakes in our criminal justice system have sent innocent people to death row. Death penalty advocates argue that executing an innocent person is extremely rare and that it is the price to pay we must pay in order to bring justice and deter crime.
But what if we accidentally executed 100 people? That might get our attention. It might seem so terrible that we would collectively agree to ban the death penalty. But if we execute just one innocent person wouldn’t it be as great a crime as if we executed a hundred? This argument has obvious limitations. One might say we should reduce the speed limit to 45 MPH because it will save that many more lives than a speed limit of 55 or 75. Where does it end? Nevertheless, regardless of how we end up calculating the cost/benefits of the death penalty or traffic laws, from a religious and spiritual perspective, it is important to remember that for God, the one means everything: “inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”
Atonement Penal Theory
The atonement is one of the few areas of mystery in LDS theology. We are often told that it is impossible to comprehend how Christ paid the price for our sins. Yet, of all the mysteries that might baffle us in the gospel, why is it the atonement that so mystifies us? Christ came down and died on the cross, paying the price for our sins. What’s so hard to understand about that?
I think what mystifies us about the atonement is that we apply our misconceptions about collective suffering to the atonement. We think that if two people starved to death, Jesus must have had to suffer twice as much to experience both of them. If two people need to be punished for committing adultery, Jesus must suffer twice for the same crime in order to bring forgiveness to both of them. Then we start adding up the infinite amount of suffering in our head and the horror of it starts to overwhelm us. So we make a quick escape into the mystery and incomprehensibility of it.
But what if George Bernard Shaw is right? What if “pain is not cumulative?” For that matter, what if sins are not cumulative? Maybe Jesus’ suffering was not a cumulative suffering for every person who ever lived, but a representational suffering. He came and experienced the worst of what a life on earth can be. But at the end of the day, He experienced life as we experience it individually. He is one of us, one of us as individuals, not one of us as part of some incomprehensible collective. To me, this idea helps me feel closer to Christ. His suffering on the cross is something I can imagine, something I can relate to, something I could even go through myself, as horrible as it is to contemplate. I take God at His word when He tells Martin Harris, that he must “suffer even as I.” The atonement is a comprehensible suffering. It is something we can understand and could experience ourselves. The fact that Christ spares us from a comprehensible suffering has more meaning than if Christ spares us from an incomprehensible suffering. He is the One, just as I am the one. We are all in this together.
Questions:
- Do you agree with Shaw that “there is no sum” to suffering?
- Is the holocaust any better for having killed 6 million Jews, not 60 million, or any worse for having killed more than just 6? Are we any better than the Nazis for advocating the death and torture of only a handful of Muslim terror suspects, as opposed to millions of Jews?
- Does a single innocent person executed by the death penalty justify opposition to it?
- What might the supremacy of the one have on discussions of our duty towards individuals who might not conform as well to the collective values we try to espouse as an institution?
- Do you think the atonement was a collective suffering, or a representational suffering?
Wheat & Tares 
I absolutely reject the idea that we can or ought to quantify suffering…. But, if I can save 60 million by killing 6 million, all other things being equal, I’d totally do it.
The concept of 6 million Jews is simply propaganda used for global manipulation. 10 newspapers from 1915-1938 spoke of 6 million Jews long before the Holocaust even happened. Why? Because 1 Jew fails to cause enough outrage to accrue privilege to the Zionists.
Read the Balfour Declaration if you would like to begin to understand the motivation for this propaganda.
I have often reflected on the idea that the atonement is representational rather than cumulative suffering. I’m glad you articulated this in a post. There’s something supernatural and hyperbolic about the cumulative idea, but if God was once a man and so forth, representational should do it. He’s just one individual.
Please release my comment from moderation.
Sorry about that Howard, I should have added “alleged” holocaust.
Hawkgrrrl, I too have been bothered about the cumulative atonement for as long as I can remember. I don’t think it exists in other Christian churches. I think it comes from the LDS understanding of the universality of “the law,” that in order for God to be God, there has an exact accounting, a kind of perfectly ordered tit for tat justice in the divine accounting books. Pauline religions see Christ as sweeping away the law. But by reintroducing the law into LDS theology, Joseph Smith opened the way up for this horrible cumulative interpretation of the atonement.
Jeff, you’ve got math on your side with your idea that “I’d kill 6 million to save 60 million.” And that is a decision generals who send their troops into battle routinely have to make. But it also brings up some messy morality which I’d like to hear you comment on. It seems to be saying “the ends justify the means” and I think I have you on record somewhere saying you disagree with that phrase.
It also makes me think back on some morality thought experiments I’ve heard. For example, if you had a time machine and could go back to when Hitler was a baby, would you shoot him in his crib? That’s the whole “minority report” dilemma. Or, would you push the fat guy onto the tracks to stop the train from crashing and killing hundreds? I think answers to these questions change depending on whether you physically have to manhandle the fat guy onto the tracks, or whether you simply flip a switch that sends the train onto the track with the fat guy on it.
There is a great movie that deals with this dilema: Looper, about a hit man from the future who goes back in a time machine to kill a child who will later become a Hitler-like evil-doer. But in the end, he can’t bring himself to do it.
Addressing the concept of no sum to suffering: Let’s say you are a Palistinian living in Gaza and your teenage son was shot and killed by the IDF for throwing rocks at them. Will your suffering be increased if the next day your house leveled by an Israeli rocket killing the rest of your family?
Looper was a pretty good premise for a movie I thought. That might make an interesting post.
It’s actually a very violent film, not very LDS- friendly, but an excellent plot with some interesting implications.
The mythology of the accumulative Atonement is a symptom of depersonalizing Christ and failing to understand that as a perfect individual and god-made-flesh, he had no reason to suffer. Therefore his suffering was unjustified and meets the requirements to provide justice to the eternal law.
That’s interesting Joe, would you elaborate? I’m not sure I understand why you say that Christ’s perfection and divine nature means that His suffering should therefore be non-cumulative. I agree that it’s non-cumulative, I’m just not sure I understand your argument for it.
Nate,
One of the big problems with LDS Mormonism is that it unctitically accepts a lot of folklore, faith promotion and propaganda as truth. How do you plan to answer big questions like this post asks with all that contaminated thinking rolled into your assumptions? Doesn’t that kind of exercise just amount to mental masturbation? How many angels could dance on the head of a pin if…? Or am I missing something really substantial here? If so what?
Nate, when you say “representational suffering” do you mean that he still suffered every possible suffering, just not in a cumulative way? Or do you mean that he lived a life with his own unique suffering as all of us do, so that’s enough? I find comfort in the idea that Christ experienced/understands the suffering associated with my personal trials. For example, I find comfort in the idea that he experienced the pains associated with childbirth and can really understand me as a woman and what that meant for me.
Maybee, I think the LDS conceptualisation of the atonement is highly influenced by several Book of Mormon scriptures, including one that says something like “he shall go about suffering the pains and afflictions of mankind…that he may know how to succour them…even more than man can suffer.” In this scripture, we get the idea that Christ suffered not only for our sins, but in order to “succour” us in our infirmities. This begs the question of whether Christ really experienced the pain of childbirth for example. How can he succour a woman when He never experienced childbirth? So we have to imagine that maybe Christ experienced all these pains in some kind of supernatural way in the Garden of Gethsemene, which various LDS theologians have told us was a lot worse than the cross, and where the “real” atonement took place.
But I think this quote from Shaw suggests that pain is pain. Is having your hands and feet nailed to a cross for hours the same as childbirth? No, but experiencing one kind of pain can be instructive of other kinds of pain. If you smash your thumb with a hammer you can know what it feels like to stub your toe. What Jesus went through on the cross was a torture so horrible it is almost beyond imagination, certainly worse than childbirth. Yet maybe a very creative torturer could come up with something even worse, and probably has. So in case there is someone out there who suffered worse than Jesus on the cross, we have the Book of Mormon which assures us that Christ suffered “more than man can suffer.”
But I still don’t think that this Book of Mormon scripture justifies us in trying to imagine that Christ’s suffering was cumulative. It was enough, and it was “more than man can suffer” but if it was too much more than man can suffer, it becomes unrelatable and inhuman. It was a personal atonement, for you and for me, and it was a representational experience of what it means to be human.
Another BofM scripture says it was an “infinite and eternal” atonement. And I think some people use the word “infinite” to justify a cumulative interpretation. But it might just be infinite in it’s healing effects, not in it’s pain.
There is an interesting prayer from Kierkegaard that says “Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered all life long that I too might be saved, and whose suffering still knows no end, this too wilt thou endure, saving and redeeming me, this patient suffering of me of whom thou hast to do, I who so often go astray.”
Kierkegaard suggests that Jesus continues to suffer, in the sense that he is with us in our present suffering, in knowing and experiencing it as we experience it. This is a more metaphysical interpretation that takes the atonement and extends it throughout eternity as part of Christ’s understanding and knowledge of our lives as we live them. We don’t have to necessarily see our sufferings as having been experienced specifically IN the garden or on the cross, but rather Jesus experiences them with us, in real time, that he continues to suffer along with us because he is aware of us and understands us.
Howard, I do think that discussions of theology in general can amount to “mental masturbation” and maybe don’t have much value. The LDS conceptualisation of the atonement, regardless of where it comes from (folklore, faith promotion, propaganda, or true doctrine), is very moving and important for some people spiritually, but can also be disturbing and faith-killing for others, like myself. I don’t much care about finding objective truths on the subject, because I don’t really think they exist or can be understood by mere mortals. I’m happy to accept folklore and propaganda, if it it is spiritually edifying. But if it is not spiritually edifying to some particular person, I think understanding that it might not be objective truth can be an important outlet. Whether the atonement was cumulative or not is not a discussion about objective truth. It is a discussion about how we understand God in our imperfect way.
Well pay no attention to Buddha’s serious inquiry into suffering then. Sorry to have interrupted, let the mental masturbation resume. Kumbaya.
If two people are both drowning, it doesn’t matter if the water is 15 feet deep for one and 150 feet deep for the other. The threat of drowning is equal.
When we hurt as much as we are capable of hurting, we are all equal in our pain.
The atonement works for each of us in a similar way. It is not a contest.
About death penalties and throwing fat men in front of trains .. Such theory of action is easy to discuss. To actually cause permanent harm to another person is something reprehensible . The basis of all major world religions is to treat others as you would want to be treated. Think about that very seriously. How can a person proclaim to believe in a higher power of any sort while discussing causing harm to someone for the greater good? Whose greater good? Not your victim’s greater good. Not society. Your actions set a precedent for society that is intolerable. If you are willing to sacrifice someone else in order to create a world that you find more tolerable, then you are the problem.
Amateurparent, you bring up the subjectivity of pain: “When we hurt as much as we are capable of hurting, we are all equal in our pain.”
This is a good point and provides more evidence against the cumulative atonement theory in my mind. From the individual’s perspective, there are no objective levels of pain and suffering. Something might hurt one person terribly, and another person not as much, because we have such different sensitivity levels. Therefore, how can there really be any objective standard punishment from an eternal perspective? If God sends two sinners to hellfire for the same crime, one sinner is going to be really zen about the fire and be able to handle it better than the other. Is that fair? So if Jesus is paying the price for those crimes, how can the punishment be measured out equally? In the end, I think like you say, Jesus pushed Himself to His own personal capacity, and that was enough, He could say “it is finished.”
Two things come to mind; no unclean thing can enter God’s house and as we will never be clean enough then why bother to try and yet more of an incomprehensible God! Nothing new,
Maybe Jesus did have a greater capacity to suffer than the rest of us. Maybe we diminish the Atonement by suggesting it was merely one man’s representational suffering.
Here’s why I think this way. Did/does Jesus have a greater capacity to love than the rest of us? Most of us only have the capacity to love a few of our fellow man, like close family and neighbors. But we think of Jesus as loving and personally caring about each and every one of us.
If we can think of Jesus’s capacity to love as greater than our own, then why not His capacity to suffer?
Ji, agreed that Christ, as a God, would have the increased capacity to suffer. And I agree that the word “representational” doesn’t do justice to the fact that Christ came to pay some kind of ultimate price.
My gripe with the “cumulative theory” of the atonement isn’t that Christ, as a God, wasn’t capable of suffering it. My gripe is that the cumulative theory suggests a horrible God, whose creation demands a fussy tit for tat justice for every sin, for the billions of adulterers, who deserve to get their hand cut off, Jesus gets His hand cut off billions of times. I don’t know if that kind of God is worthy of worship.
I don’t feel the need to endorse any man-made “theory” regarding the Atonement — indeed, I usually dislike academic or theological theories regarding matters of faith. Putting it as you did, I would agree that tit-for-tat is an inadequate explanation. For me, other explanations are also inadequate. I rejoice in simply knowing that God Himself came to live among us and fulfilled the law in dying for my sins and the sins of the whole world. How wonderful it is!
ji, I agree with your general sentiments. What I’m calling the “cumulative theory” is not something I’ve heard articulated per se, but rather was my own assumption about the atonement growing up based on the cultural understandings I was given about the nature of law, justice, and mercy in LDS theology. To articulate the cumulative theory, as I have done, is to highlight it’s horrific absurdity. So rather than articulate it, we have all escaped into the mystery of it, preferring, as you say, not to try to theorise about the atonement, but simply say “in some way impossible to comprehend, Christ paid the price for our sins.”
The fact that facets of LDS culture and theology point to the cumulative theory probably doesn’t bother most people. But it bothered me, and it decreased the feeling of intimacy and relationship I felt with God. I present my own theory as an alternative to the cumulative theory for people like myself, who struggle over the theology of the atonement.. Not that my theory is necessarily any more true. I just want to try to show that he cumulative theory need not become an obstruction to faith, when there are reasonable alternative interpretations.
Thank you….