BOOK REVIEW:
Do No Harm: Social Sin and Christian Responsibility. By Stephen G. Ray, Jr. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003.  208 pp. ISBN 0800634977.

We do not view social realities “from nowhere,” but from very definite points of view which are structured by linguistic conventions rooted in social interests. This, by and large, is the message of Stephen Ray to theologians who wish to employ “sin” language to interpret contemporary social life. When “sin” or “sinner” is used to signify specific persons or practices, he argues, “discursive economies” that serve to legitimate given power structures by degrading or even dehumanizing persons or sectors of a society that are viewed as threats are all but inevitably invoked. “Sin” talk thereby becomes entangled with established prejudices. The end result is that such talk sanctions rather than challenges the marginalization of persons.  Ray’s plea to theologians to “do no harm” is intended to call attention to these sorts of (mostly unintended) consequences of employing “sin” talk carelessly.

The bulk of Ray’s argument is a diagnosis of the problem. Two of the more illustrious twentieth-century theological critics of contemporary culture, Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are used as examples. Ray performs a “rhetorical analysis” upon their work in order to expose the unwholesome, and quite subtle, influence of racist discursive economies upon their interpretations of contemporary social problems.  Niebuhr’s account of the oppression of blacks in America, he suggests, employs such standard, though heavily freighted, expressions as “Negro” and “backward culture” in such a way that the agency of African Americans is underappreciated. This glitch in Niebuhr’s analysis, according to Ray, creates a category of persons who are unique embodiments of social sin (since they do not responsibly contribute to society’s welfare), but who are by definition incapable of exercising agency. The creation of this category of “fated sinner” for the purpose of referring to a marginalized social group, Ray charges, unwittingly sanctions its marginalization. Another way in which theologians collude with unwholesome discursive economies, according to Ray, is exemplified in Bonhoeffer’s characterization of “the Jew.” In this case, though Bonhoeffer argued forcefully against the oppression of Jewish people in Hitler’s Germany, his uncritical use of the expression, “the Jew,” effectively reinforces cultural prejudices about a social group viewed as “alien” or “other,” and thus condemns them as a threat to the social order.

Ray’s argument is not all diagnosis and no “cure,” however. His proposal for avoiding the pitfall of “sin” talk he identifies in Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer involves a retrieval of the “principle of participation” which characterized the Reformers’ doctrine of sin. For Luther and Calvin, Ray points out, all persons are tainted before God because they participate in the original sin of Adam. Thus, Ray argues, a differentiation in the fundamental condition of human beings as sinners is ruled out. The category of sin, therefore, may not be licitly used within the Reformers’ theological trajectory in order to render an “existential assessment of the state of human affairs,” or to “make relative judgments about differing social configurations” (p. 109).

For many readers, the solution embodied in these quotations will be disappointing. Ray is at his strongest when he deftly points out the ways in which racist discursive economies subtly infect theological analysis and thereby cause it to distort, rather than illumine, reality. This is an important critique, since for theologians like Niebuhr the illumination of reality is one of the purposes of theology. Ray’s counsel, however, is not to work harder at this task, or to interact more thoroughly with contemporary sources of insight about current social realities, but to stop trying to make “sin” a category that refers to empirical realties at all. Ray appears to believe that “sin” talk, properly used, is merely a way to fence out the dangers of misunderstanding and misinterpretation that intrude upon the theologian who attempts social criticism. From the perspective of a theological “realist,” Ray pays a hefty price for this security, however. Theology, in his view, can have nothing to say in order to help us with the traditionally religious task of discriminating good and evil in our world. “Secular” knowledge, it would appear, is left in control of the field.

Thomas A. James
Ph.D. Candidate, Union-PSCE
Cincinnati, OH

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, WINTER 2004, VOL. 4, #1.