George W. Stroup
Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia 

1. Introduction 

Traditionally sin and redemption have played prominent roles in Christian theology. They have been especially important in Christian descriptions of human being or what is sometimes described as “theological anthropology.” Sin describes both those acts which estrange human beings from God and from one another and the condition of estrangement in which humanity finds itself Furthermore, sin is not the way humanity is supposed to be. It is a “fall” away from what should be. Or, as one contemporary theologian puts it, “historical man is non-coincident with his own ideality.”¹ Redemption, on the other hand, describes the “buying back,” the retrieval, the transformation of humanity, along with the rest of creation, in Jesus Christ. 

Although theological anthropology has a lengthy history in Christian thought, one could make a case that no other doctrine has undergone greater revision in the twentieth century. The reconstruction of theological anthropology has been driven for the most part by new developments in the natural and social sciences. The challenge, as many twentieth century theologians have understood it, is how to reinterpret classical Christian convictions about human beings, especially convictions about sin and redemption, in light of the significant changes that have occurred in disciplines such as biology, psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology. If you have been reading what contemporary theologians have written recently about theological anthropology, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion they have been playing “catch up” with new developments in the description of human being in these other disciplines. 

These new developments in theological anthropology are significant, and we might profit considerably this evening by examining what theologians have had to say recently about human being. However, I would like to take a slightly different tack. I propose that we consider not what is new in theological anthropology at the end of the twentieth century, but something that is very old; something that perhaps has become a diminished theme in recent theology and, more importantly, a diminished reality in Christian life and experience. What I have in mind is what I take to be a basic assumption about human beings in the Bible and in Christian tradition—namely, that human beings are created and called to live coram Deo—before God. 

In Christian faith, human life is lived, from beginning to end, before God. That is, human life is lived before the face of and in the sight of God. At one time Christian worship, piety, faith, and even theology presupposed that the most important fact about human existence was this coram. The very nature of faith as trust in God, the conviction that God is creator of all that is, that life is rooted in God’s promises and covenants, that sin is not only “missing the mark” and “going astray” but also the attempt to flee and hide from God, that redemption is both the forgiveness of sin and new life in Jesus Christ that looks forward to a new heaven and a new earth gathered in eternal doxology—all these convictions presuppose that human life once was, is now, and forever will be lived “before God.” Furthermore, if this conviction that life is lived before God has recently experienced an eclipse, then it is perhaps not surprising that significant change, and perhaps even deep confusion, has emerged in our understanding of sin and redemption. 

2. coram Deo 

Before we turn to sin and redemption, what briefly is the nature of this coram—his 'beforeness'—so basic to the Christian understanding of human being? Let me try to clarify what I mean by coram by means of five brief, slightly disjointed, enigmatic comments. 

First, coram describes the priority of God ontologically in the relation between God and human creatures. Human beings live before God; God does not live before human beings. Coram has temporal, spatial, and ontological implications. We must not misunderstand what 'beforeness' means in regard to temporality. Feuerbach notwithstanding, 'beforeness' does not mean that ‘before’ there was God there were human beings. Arius may have been wrong about the Logos, but not about human beings. There was indeed a time when the creature was not. But what must be said about creation, including the human, cannot be said about God. 

So too coram says something about the spatial world. The world in which human beings live is, in the most important sense, “before God.” The spatial world, like temporality, is contingent, and its contingency is finally dependent upon God. It is God and God alone who freely and gratuitously calls human beings into the relationship of 'beforeness.' 

Second, coram entails not just the ontological distinction between God and human beings, but also a relationship of covenantal communion. To live before God is to live in a covenantal communion characterized by gift, calling, and demand. 

This covenant communion is both a gift and a calling. It is a gift because God initiates it. To live before God is to be called into communion. It is not a communion initiated or negotiated by human beings. It has about it the character of ‘giftedness’. Hence, as the Heidelberg Catechism recognized, the appropriate response to the giftedness of life before God is thanksgiving and gratitude. 

One feature of gratitude for the call into communion is faithfulness understood as deep trust in the One who calls and confidence in the goodness of life because that goodness is also rooted in the goodness of the One who calls. 

And if this coram is the Christian’s calling, can theology be anything less? The Puritan theologian, William Ames, aptly described theology as “the doctrine or teaching of living to God.”² And what does it mean to “live to God?” According to Ames, people do that when “they live in accord with the will of God, to the glory of God, and with God working in them.” To live this way, he wrote, “is not necessarily to be happy but it is to live well.” And “to live well” means that what we should strive for in life “is not happiness which has to do with our own pleasure, but goodness which looks to God’s glory.” Theology, therefore, according to Ames, “is better defined as that good life whereby we live to God than as that happy life whereby we live to ourselves.”³ 

Or, as Jim Gustafson puts it, 

Ethics in theocentric perspective does not guarantee happiness, though it does not consign us to discontent. It requires consenting to the governance of the powers of God, and joining in those purposes that can be discerned. God does not exist simply for the service of man; man exists for the service of God.⁴ 

That is not an understanding of theology and ethics I encounter frequently at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. 

To live before God is not only a gift, but also a demand. That is, it is not an open-ended relationship, but a structured one. God has expectations about how humans are to live before God. Initially, this beforeness is structured by means of the two trees in the creation story. Only to the humans in this gifted world does God say, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:16b-17). The forbidden tree is not itself a deception, but to eat of it and to violate the covenant in which it is enmeshed destroys communion. It leads to self-deception, not because to eat of it is to know too much, but because to eat of it is to know too little. The human’s choice in the creation stories is not first and foremost between knowledge and God. The choice is between living in a world at the center of which is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or living in a world at the center of which is God. 

To live before God is to live in a structured relationship. This side of the fall it is a beforeness structured by Torah and in particular by the commandments. To live before God is, in the words of Marty Feldman to Gene Wilder in the film “Young Frankenstein,” to “walk this way.” And “this way,” is both a description of how one is to walk and live and the direction in which one is to walk and live. As Ames wrote, it is to live to God. Or, if I may slightly paraphrase the NRSV’s version of the first Psalm: 

Happy are those who walk not in the counsel of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight in is the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night. (Psalm 1: 1-2) 

Third, the communion that comes with living before God is the basis for the calling human beings have to live in communion with one another. The two—communion with God and communion with neighbor—are as inextricably related as the two tables of God’s commandments and the two parts of Jesus’ summary of the law. Although the first is the basis of the second, the two must not be separated. According to I John 4:20-21 one cannot live before God and hate one’s neighbor. Nor can one live in communion with one’s neighbors and not live before God. Contrary to the conviction of much of late twentieth century liberal Protestantism, living in community and loving neighbor cannot serve as a substitute for living before and loving God. 

In the Bible the persistent concern for righteousness or justice in human relations is rooted in the righteousness and justice of God. Hence justice cannot be an end in itself, for if it is an end in itself then it is simply a human construction and as such a projection of a thoroughly human agenda. To paraphrase H. Richard Niebuhr, God is righteous and just, but righteousness and justice are not God. 

Fourth, coram is a verbal relationship. God speaks humans, like the rest of creation, into being. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’. . .” (Genesis 1:26). In the creation stories in Genesis God’s speaking is God’s doing. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1: 3). The relationship between God and creation and the relationship in particular between God and human beings is mediated by the Word. God creates by speaking and humans are to listen and then in light of what they bear address God and one another. Human speech, therefore, is neither exclusively nor even primarily a social phenomenon between neighbors, but first and foremost a theological reality. Speech has something to do with who God is and what it means for humans to live, first, before God, and second, in communion with one another. 

In biblical narrative humans are called to listen because it is God who speaks first. Human speech, therefore, is true when it responds obediently to the prior reality of God’s Word and God’s address. False speech—the lie—is not simply the distortion of the truth, although it is that, but, more significantly, it is speech that is not obedient to the Word by which it has been addressed, but an attempt to find some ground, some basis, other than the reality of God’s Word and God’s address. 

To live before God and to be truly and faithfully human is, first, to allow oneself to be addressed by God, and, second, to speak truthfully to God. It is listening to and speaking obediently to God that is also the basis for allowing oneself to be addressed by and to speak truthfully to one’s neighbor. 

Finally, coram, specifies both the purpose and the telos of human existence. To live before God means that human beings, along with the rest of creation, are called to live in everlasting praise of God. The true end of human beings and the most authentic form of human speech are doxology. The “chief end” of human beings—“end” in both senses of “meaning” and of “goal”—is neither happiness nor self-fulfillment nor human flourishing, but to glorify God and enjoy God forever. It is, in Ames’ words, “to live well.” 

This biblical understanding of what it means to live before God seems increasingly alien and perhaps even unintelligible to North American and Western European cultures in which consumerism, as exemplified in the advertising industry, is predicated on the assumption that the chief end of human existence is happiness, a happiness achieved by stealing someone’s credit card number from their waste basket, buying a yacht, and sailing off into the sunset. Christian faith finds in the Bible a different claim. Happiness is not a matter of “topping off” the self, nor is self-gratification the chief end of human existence; rather, happiness is a consequence of life lived before God and in the praise of God. 

That is true in the most important sense not because of who human beings are, but because of who God is. The God before whom humans live is a splendor beyond human comprehension, to who humans can respond appropriately only by adoration and praise. It may be true that humans have a deep, primordial need to worship, but the worship of God is rooted not primarily in human need, but in the nature of the One before whom humans live. To live before God is to live in praise, adoration, and worship of God. 

As it is described in the Bible, therefore, to live coram Deo, to live before God, is, first, to live as creature before the Creator. Second, the nature of this 'beforeness' is to live in covenant communion with God, and, third, to live in communion with one’s neighbors. Fourth, it is to live as one who has been and continues to be addressed by God and whose vocation is truthful and obedient response to God. Finally, the address appropriate to life before God is that of praise, adoration, and worship. 

It is this understanding of human existence as life lived before God that is presupposed in Scripture by the language of sin and redemption. And it is precisely this presupposition that seems to have been eclipsed in the interpretation of sin and redemption in contemporary theology and in the life of the church. Let us examine first contemporary interpretations of sin and then turn to redemption. 

3. Sin 

Rather than turning first to what theologians have had to say about sin, let us take Schleiermacher to heart—that does, after all, seem like an appropriate place to take Schleiermacher—and begin with Christian piety. “Christian doctrines,” Schleiermacher argued, “are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.”⁵ Therefore, let us begin with what may seem like an unlikely text—the new Presbyterian Hymnal that was adopted in 1990. In turning to the Presbyterian Hymnal I do not want to debate the extent to which it is or is not an authentic reflection of the piety of Presbyterian congregations. Nor do I want to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the new hymnal. There is much to be said for it, but what I find interesting in it is what has become of the language of sin and redemption. 

Gone from the new hymnal are old favorites in the 1955 “red” hymnal. There was too much blood and gore in those pious, old hymns and they were hopelessly individualistic, if not privatistic. Witness this work by Augustus Toplady: 

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee-,
Let the water and the blood, From Thy wounded side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r. 

Even worse is the following hymn, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” sometimes referred to as “the Dracula hymn;” 

There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains. 

But before we bid these old hymns good riddance, it might be worthwhile reflecting on them in light of Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the symbols of evil.⁶ The blood and gore in these old hymns may be offensive to our modem sensibilities, but if we read them in light of Ricoeur’s analysis, they may reflect far more of the biblical reality of evil—understood in terms of defilement, sin, and guilt—than do our new hymns. And it is just possible they may be a more accurate reflection of the biblical understanding of sin than our new and improved models. 

The new Presbyterian hymnal includes several authors who were not in the 1955 “red” hymnal. Two of the best known are Jane Parker Huber and Brian Wren. There are eleven hymns by each in the new hymnal. Between them they have contributed twenty-two hymns and eighty-nine verses that will shape the piety and faith of future generations of Presbyterians.⁷ In these eighty-nine verses, the word “sin” appears three times. Two of the three are in a native American hymn Parker has revised. The third is in a hymn, “O God of Earth and Space,” that reads, “Wherever freedom reigns, where sin is overthrown, where justice fused with mercy rules, there you are known.” It is not clear in the hymn who overthrows sin. 

Now, to be fair, although the word “sin” appears only three times in these twenty-two hymns, there are several references to different manifestations of sin. Huber’s version of the twenty-third psalm includes the phrase “my soul from evil freeing.” Another hymn acknowledges that humans do “blur [God’s] gracious image.” In her revision of Chesterton’s “O God of Earth and Altar,” Huber writes that “Oppressive systems snare us; Our apathies increase.” In another hymn we are called to “Live into hope of captives freed.” One of Wren’s hymns refers to the divisions created by color, scorn or wealth. Another asks forgiveness for spoiling and plundering “water, soil, and air.” Yet another acknowledges that, 

We come with self-inflicted pains
Of broken trust and chosen wrong,
Half-free, half-bound by inner chains,
By social forces swept along,
By powers and systems close confined.

And Wren’s final hymn does acknowledge that Christians are “forgiven, loved, and free” because of “His life laid down for me.” 

I do not want to make too much of these hymns, but I suspect they may be an accurate reflection of the faith and life of at least some Presbyterians. Furthermore, there are some striking similarities between these hymns and much of what I read in contemporary theology. 

In the first place, the word “sin,” if not the reality, has fallen on hard times. Why are these hymn writers apparently reluctant to use the word “sin?” And the problem is not just with those who write hymns. There appears to be as much reluctance to use the word “sin” in the larger culture as there is in the life of the church. 

President Clinton first used the language of “mistake” and “error in Judgment” to describe his recent behavior. Only in the presence of clergy and the media—perhaps the late twentieth century equivalent of the confessional—was he finally able to say, “I have sinned.” 

Has sin fallen under eclipse in contemporary life because it has taken on so much unwanted moral and cultural baggage that we would rather give up speaking of it altogether? Or has sin fallen out of favor because of another eclipse—the eclipse of living “before God?” 

Contemporary theologians continue to write about sin, although there have been some significant shifts in the way sin is interpreted. How are we to account for these changes in theological interpretation? Are theologians also caught up in the loss of a sense of living before God? If “God” is nothing but a concept we have constructed, primarily for noble moral purposes, then it may indeed be difficult to live before this God. 

In Christian theology sin is both act and condition. Gustafson reminds us that sin is a multi-faceted reality.⁸ There is, first, that experience of misplaced trust that the Christian tradition calls idolatry. Second, there is the experience of “misplaced valuations of objects of desire” that the tradition refers to as wrongly ordered love. Third, there are “the erroneous perceptions of the relations of things to each other and of our understanding of things” or corrupt rationality. And, finally, there is the experience of “unfulfilled obligations and duties” that the tradition calls disobedience. Each of these—idolatry, wrongly ordered love, corrupt rationality, and disobedience—presupposes that human beings live before God. Consequently, if sin has been eclipsed in both our ecclesial and our public discourse, it may be that the problem is not with just one of these facets of sin, but with their presupposition—that life is lived before God. 

Second, there is little indication in the hymns we have examined or in much contemporary theology that sin—both as act and as condition—is something that takes place “before God,” and that its most significant consequence is the disruption of living before the face of and in the sight of God. In Christian scripture sin is first and foremost a theological issue, but in much recent theology and in the contemporary life of the church sin seems to be primarily, even exclusively, a moral category. While sin in the Bible cannot be separated from its moral consequences, sin also must not be reduced to morality. One reason Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Genesis 22 in terms of the “teleological suspension of the ethical” sounds odd to us is because we cannot imagine any telos other than the ethical.⁹ The suggestion that moral decisions, like all others, must be made in the larger context of living before God seems not only strange but also dangerous. 

Third, Huber, Wren and many contemporary theologians, especially liberation theologians, seem more comfortable with the social and institutional dimensions of sin than they are with the individual and personal. Perhaps that is not surprising. In much of American Christianity sin has been hopelessly confused with white, middle-class morality. Sin is so woven into our understanding of sexuality it seems almost impossible to untangle. In the past sin has been interpreted in the context of individual, even private, existence and rarely in terms of social and institutional realities. Contemporary hymn writers and theologians have undertaken to correct that mistake. But today hymn writers and theologians—and perhaps Presbyterian preachers as well—are more likely to write about racism, sexism, classism, and any number of other -isms than they are about dishonoring parents, adultery, and lying. 

The reduction of sin to morality almost seems to suggest that the first table of the law no longer exists, and that the second table is more a social policy than a description of both individual and communal life before God. 

When the emphasis in the interpretation of sin falls heavily on the social and institutional dimension of human life, one consequence of the neglect of the personal and individual is that there is little awareness of sin as ingratitude. If the emphasis is on the sinfulness of social structures, then it becomes difficult to be grateful for the gifts of the world and for life before God. In such a condition of ingratitude it is understandable why the deepest human yearning may be for happiness rather than for living well. 

Fourth, there is another important dimension to sin that is largely missing from the new hymns we have briefly examined. It is, however, present in some of those old hymns we so readily bid farewell—namely, the use of the image of blindness to describe sin or what we sometimes refer to as self-deception, as in “I was blind, but now I see.” Self-deception falls between the cracks of act and condition. To be in sin is to be self-deceived, and, of course, the very nature of self-deception is that one does not and cannot know that one is self-deceived. We both live in self-deception and we act in self-deceiving ways, and in both cases we are unaware. If sin means human beings are “turned around” and no longer live before God, then they no longer know that from which they have turned and that from which they flee. Even worse they no longer know they are turned around and in flight. What difference does it make whether sin is or is not understood as a theological reality that presupposes life before God? We know that in the Bible and in Christian faith sin is closely linked with guilt. In the words of the writer of the fifty-first psalm, 

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.
Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.
(Psalm 51:3-5) 

What we have perhaps forgotten is that in the world of the Bible the subjective reality of guilt is resolved only by the confession of the objective reality of sin. That is such a familiar feature of Christian faith—the linkage between guilt, sin, confession, and pardon-that we take it for granted. What the language of the psalmist presupposes, however, is that guilt cannot be resolved except in the confession of sin, and the confession of sin presupposes that the guilty one lives before an Other who can pardon his or her sin and in so doing absolve the guilt. 

The truly terrifying dilemma at the end of the twentieth century may be that many people are indeed acutely aware of their guilt, but because they do not believe they live before God, they do not understand themselves to be sinners. And if they do not know themselves to be sinners, there is no way their guilt can be absolved, because even if forgiveness were spoken and offered they could not hear it. 

The dynamics of sin, guilt, confession, and forgiveness seem to be a large part of the tragic story of David and Absalom in Second Samuel. After years in exile Absalom finally returns to his father, who kisses him and forgives him, even though Absalom confesses no sin. And there is much for Absalom to confess. But apparently Absalom does not really care about his father’s forgiveness, for in the next chapter we find him sitting outside Jerusalem’s gate plotting to steal his father’s throne. The confession of sin and the declaration of forgiveness are the only resolution to the problem of guilt, and there can be no confession of sin and no forgiveness unless one lives before a God to whom one can confess and who can forgive. Somehow, therapists are just not quite the same. 

4. Redemption 

In discussing sin and guilt we have already mentioned pardon. In Christian theology sin and redemption are dialectically related; that is, the one necessarily entails the other—both experientially and theologically. Sin is never fully intelligible apart from the experience of redemption. Indeed, the nature of sin as self-deception means that the acknowledgment, recognition, and confession of sin are possible only on this side of redemption. Paul’s exclamation in Romans 7, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” is not a cry of utter despair, because it is followed immediately by “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25) It is only because the latter—rescue from death by Christ—is a reality for Paul that he is able to acknowledge, recognize, and confess the full horror of that from which he has been rescued or redeemed. 

If the recognition of sin presupposes the reality of redemption, so too redemption presupposes the reality of sin. Redemption is a buying back, a rescue, a retrieval, a recovery of that which once was lost but now is found. Consequently, if it is the case that sin as that which disrupts life lived before God has been eclipsed, then it is hardly surprising that we might also be confused about the language and the reality of redemption. Furthermore, if we are confused about redemption, that may be in part because we are confused about sin. More importantly, it may be we are confused about both sin and redemption because both presuppose that human beings are called to live before God, and it is the eclipse of this “beforeness” that constitutes our true dilemma. 

There does seem to be evidence in both the life of the church and in contemporary theology that we are deeply confused as to what we mean by terms like redemption and salvation. We appear to be confused not only about that from which we have been redeemed (that is, sin), but also about that for which we are being redeemed and the process of redemption itself I suggested earlier that Ames’ description of the goal of theology as living well, which means living to God, may sound strange to us. We may be more comfortable with Elizabeth Johnson’s description of the goal of feminist theology than we are with Ames’ understanding of theology. Johnson writes, 

The goal toward which this theological effort passionately journeys is transformation into new community. Feminist liberation theology hopes so to change unjust structures and distorted symbol systems that a new community in church and society becomes possible, a liberating community of all women and men characterized by mutuality with each other and harmony with the earth. . . . This vision of redeemed humanity, though never fully realized, becomes more actual in every partial move from situations of domination/subordination to a community where subservience is unknown thanks to relationships of mutual respect, reciprocal valuing, and sharing in solidarity with the dispossessed.¹⁰ 

Surely most human beings yearn for “that day,” as Isaiah describes it, when human relations will be characterized by mutuality and reciprocity rather than by domination and exploitation. But the sacred texts by which Christians live suggest that when “that day” arrives it will be characterized not simply by the absence of subservience and the reality of equal relationships, but above all else by a community that is gathered before God. Indeed, it will be because the human community is gathered before God that human relations will be mutual and reciprocal. Human beings will not be gathered before God because they have finally managed to build the ideal community. However, if humanity no longer yearns to live together before God, if that is not what it means to be redeemed, then all we have left is each other, and redemption becomes solely a matter of relations within the community. To reduce redemption to human relationships is to invite despair because in our best moments, when we are capable of at least partial honesty, we recognize we cannot redeem ourselves, nor can the community redeem us. 

And who are these people who will live together in a community of mutuality and reciprocity? Johnson describes human beings in terms of what she call “anthropological constants.” 

All persons are constituted by a number of essential relations, which may be called anthropological constants. These include relation to bodiliness as the medium of the human spirit, relation through the body to the whole ecological network of the earth, relation to significant other persons as the matrix in which individuality arises, and to community as the context for identity, relation to social, political, and economic structures; conditioning by historical time and place, the play of theory in the praxis of one’s culture as opposed to instinct alone; and orientation to hope and the pull of the future. These constants mutually condition one another, and are constitutive of the humanity of persons.¹¹ 

The anthropological constants are our relation to body, to nature, to significant others, to community, to social, political, and economic structures, to history, to culture, and to the future. It is these relations, she argues, that are constitutive of humanity. You probably noticed that missing from this list of anthropological constants is any reference to God or the relation of human beings to God. Whatever one might say about living before God, apparently Johnson does not understand it to be constitutive of what it means to be human. And whatever it means to be redeemed, to be bought back, to be re-tuned, it will not be a turning again toward God and before God, but, at best, a turning in community toward one another. 

By means of the wisdom tradition and Jesus-Sophia, Johnson affirms the immanence of God and does not neglect the theme of transcendence, but transcendence seems to be more the incomprehensibility and unknowability of God than the “otherness” of the God before whom humanity lives. 

In the context of biblical narrative human beings cannot be reduced to their communities. Both in the beginning and at “the end,” according to the biblical story, human beings live in community and are indeed constituted by their relations to one another. However, in both the beginning and the end, they are constituted not primarily by their relations to one another, but by a prior relationship. They are indeed gathered together, but they are gathered together by God and before God. 

We may not know what to make of it, but according to the poetry of Revelation to be redeemed is to be re-gathered before God for one purpose. 

. . . I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10) 

In this strange vision of the meaning and end of human existence there is indeed a community—from every nation, tribe, and tongue—but it is a vision of community in which the emphasis is first and foremost not on the mutuality and reciprocity between human beings, but on their location, “before the throne” and before the Lamb, and on their crying out, their loud song of doxology. In the context of North American culture, what an odd, odd notion of redemption and salvation—to sing doxology to God. 

It must seem that way to contemporary theologians as well, because not many describe human beings and the meaning and end of human existence in terms of the worship of God. Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Anthropology in Theological Perspective is an impressive reinterpretation of human being by means of Arnold Gehlen’s “openness to the world,” and Helmuth Plessner’s concept of 'exocentricity.'¹² But after five hundred pages of conversation with these and other social scientists one hopes Pannenberg might say something about the role of worship in a theological account of human being. One hopes in vain. 

Edward Farley briefly mentions the significance of coram Deo and of worship in his discussion of “being-founded” in his book Good and Evil.¹³ In the final two chapters, however, in which Farley describes redemptive communities as “communities of the face” there is no suggestion that the primary characteristic of these communities is worship and doxology. 

George Hendry once described prayer as “the lifeline of theology,” and suggested that one criterion for assessing systematic theologies is what they have to say about prayer. In all too many cases, Hendry argued, one finds little or nothing about the topic, I doubt that Hendry would disagree if we expanded his criterion slightly and made worship, of which prayer is an integral part, the criterion for assessing theological proposals in general and theological anthropology in particular. If the role of worship were at least one criterion for assessing theology, one would have to ask which interpretations of God by contemporary theologians invite a response of adoration and worship. I doubt the results of such an inquiry would be encouraging. 

To be redeemed is not only to live with one’s neighbors in a relation of mutuality and reciprocity; it is to live with one’s neighbors before God and to sing in a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb.” It is not because people live with their neighbors in relations of mutuality and reciprocity that they are able so to sing. It is because, finally, on that day, people will sing doxology to God that they will live together in relations of mutuality and reciprocity. 

If redemption, like sin, presupposes that that to which we are returned is life before God, what does redemption mean in light of what we described as the meaning of coram Deo? 

First, to be re-deemed is to live again before God as God’s creature, content to be a finite creature and for God to be God. To so live is no longer to strive to be what one is not and cannot become or to flee from what God has created one to be. Neither yearning nor flight characterize redeemed life before God, which is closer to some sense of “at-homeness.” The last verse of Isaac Watts’ paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm plays on deep chords within us. “No more a stranger, or a guest, but like a child at home.” 

Second, to be redeemed is to be “bought back” and “brought back” into communion with God. This 'boughtness' in redemption suggests the transformation from being lost to being at home is costly to the one who redeems. Indeed, the costliness may even be at a “great price.” Life before God is a great gift, but an even greater gift for the human being who has turned away from God is to be re-turned and to discover new life in the midst of death. To be re-turned is to live gratefully before God. 

Third, to be redeemed is to live in communion with one’s neighbor. It is clear in biblical narrative, especially in stories like Luke’s description of Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, that to live in the presence of the one who brings salvation evokes such joy and gratitude from the sinner that the sinner is compelled to act justly in regard to the victims of injustice and compassionately in regard to those who previously were a matter of indifference. “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:9-10) What the national offices of many Protestant denominations have never quite seemed to understand is that in biblical narrative it is joy and gratitude for redemption that is the basis for social justice rather than the reverse. 

Fourth, to be redeemed is also to be re-turned to authentic speech. It is to give up speaking in order first to listen, and after listening before God to true speech from God only then to speak truthfully to God and neighbor. It is to heed the repeated urging of Israel’s prophets, especially Jeremiah, to be a people who first listens and in listening hears the address and in hearing learns how to speak and live authentically. 

Finally, true and authentic speech before God is above all else the language of worship. It is the language of doxology and adoration. It is true and appropriate speech because it is addressed to the One who alone is true, and it is appropriate because it is doxology to which the human community is called as it is gathered before God. The many interpretations of theological anthropology that neglect doxology inadequately describe redemption because they neglect that to which human life is returned—namely, life before God. 

5. Coram, Presence, and Absence 

Have I not been more than just a little unfair in this description of contemporary theological anthropology and current trends in the life of the church? Is not an appeal for a recovery of coram Deo an exercise in religious and theological nostalgia? There may have been a time—long ago and far away—when Christian lived in a world that was “before God,” but surely that is no longer our world. Our world is characterized not by a metaphysics of presence, but by the reality of absence; our world is characterized not by life before One who is other than us and who is at the center of our world, but by our relations to one another in a world in which there is no center. Is not an appeal to coram Deo a futile attempt to return to a logocentrism in which the logos invites idolatry and serves as a foundation for fixed, oppressive structures that subvert truth to power? 

I take these “postmodern” questions very seriously, and although not quite the same, they are in some respects strikingly similar to questions asked not so long ago by figures such as Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. 

Both modernists and post-modernists consider coram Deo highly objectionable, but for different reasons. For modernists there is simply no such reality as God. At best we are gathered before a projection of our own needs, Wishes, fears, and illusions. For post-modernists not only is there no God, there is no fixed center to life and there is no presence that structures our life together and deserves our worship. 

Two brief responses. First, it does seem that a certain sense of “nostalgia” is intrinsic to Christian theology in any of its traditional, recognizable forms. The logic of sin and redemption in Christian scripture assumes something has been lost, forgotten, misplaced, or left behind and that Christians yearn for its retrieval, even if that retrieval means not going back, but a turning, a transformation, that looks to the future of “that day.” So, is an emphasis on coram Deo an exercise in religious nostalgia? Yes, but in the context of Christian faith, for good reason. 

And what about the categories of 'presence' and 'absence'? How can Christians affirm the presence of God in light of the events of the twentieth century? Is not the truth of our condition that we live not in the presence, but in the eclipse and absence of God? These are large questions, but it is not self-evident whether the problem surrounding presence and absence is with God or with us. Theologically we often speak of the problem of God’s presence, as though God has gone missing. The other option, of course, is that the problem is not so much God’s presence and absence as our own. It may be that the absence we lament is not so much the absence of God as it is our own absence—our decision to remove ourselves—from before God.

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