A view from the stern: James Alison's theology (so Far)

He thinks otherwise, in the first place, because an account of original sin that left out its remote explanation would not fulfill one of the goals of the dissertation on which The joy of Being Wrong is based, namely the goal of showing that the sagesse Girard's writings make available illuminates, without undermining, official church teaching. For Alison, the doctrinal linking of proximate with remote explanations, of originated sin with an originating sin on the part of humankind's first parents, is not to be set aside. More generally, in the second place, he considers that without such a link, which is to say without a hypothesis about an origin like the one he proposes, original sin remains unexplicated. Accordingly we may ask what he would count as an explication.

On this methodological question there is some tension in Alison's thinking. He has a certain aversion to philosophically informed reasoning. It would seem, for example, that the purpose of a hypothesis about origins would be to provide an explanation, and that is the word I have used here. But The Joy of Being Wrong has a long polemical passage against explaining in general and against explaining original sin in particular (Joy 261-265). It may be that Alison's aim is to forestall "explaining" in the sense of explaining away-reducing human evil to something less, and less mysterious, than original sin. However, when he goes on to say that Christians have no explanation of anything at all, that they have only a revelation, he is saying more, and what he says sounds very much like fideism. Again, it would seem that a hypothesis about origins would be a causal hypothesis. But Alison is as reluctant to speak of original sin in terms of causation as he is to speak of explaining it. Here too there may be only a problem of definition. Identifying a cause can mean identifying someone to blame or accuse-Adam, Eve, the snake-and accusation and blame are irrelevant, since the whole effort in The Joy of Being Wrong is to see original sin as a state of affairs that is being forgiven.

As for what explication might look like positively, Alison's views are not easy to pin down. He does refer repeatedly to the example of Paul in Romans by way of suggesting what a hypothesis about origins is and does. But Paul's support for a project such as Alison's is ambivalent at best. On the one hand, Romans is undoubtedly the classical precedent for tracing human sinfulness to an origin "in the beginning." But on the other, Paul does not trace it to a founding murder, of which he gives hardly a hint, but to Adam. That, however, in Alison's judgment, does not signify (joy 130). It was from revelation in Christ that Paul came to know about the universality of sin; in Adam he found "a useful way of illustrating" what he knew (joy 155). The universality must have begun somewhere, and Adam was "a more convenient way of talking about this than any other" (joy 241). Formally, Alison's own reasoning is similar. Grant that there is a futility, an impotence, coextensive with human history and culture; grant further that this condition is not necessary but contingent; and the conclusion that the state of affairs known as original sin had an origin is unavoidable. Adam is optional, to some extent, but a functionally equivalent story about our earliest ancestors is not. Explication demands one beginning for all human sin and, to quote Humani Generis as Alison does, "it does not appear how" such a beginning is compatible with anything other than monogenism (joy 244).