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Western Christianity has had a troublesome guilt-shame complex ever since Augustine of Hippo. In his dualistic schema, human anthropology and God’s grace are framed as being in conflict, which creates the need for a theological seesaw effect. The former must go down for the latter to go up. Humanity’s sinful nature is cold, filthy, and wretched so that God’s righteous grace is warm, pure, and blessed. This is how you arrive at the Western understanding of original sin, which is widely albeit strangely regarded as an essential tenet of historic orthodoxy.
If you believe in that Augustinian framework, you’ve bought into a lie. His anthropology reflects an epic battle with Pelagius that locked down his thinking in a logical fallacy: false dichotomy. There is another way. This whole time, Eastern Orthodoxy has held a healthy non-dualistic appreciation of paradox, which avoids the whole teeter-totter nonsense simply by maintaining the original tension between the doctrines of the imago dei and the fall. It’s called ancestral sin and it affirms human brokenness without minimizing our status as God’s beloved image-bearers.
All those musings may initially seem off-topic, but they’re a vital step in clearing away the clutter and debris. It’s necessary to remove bad presuppositions in order to create room for fresh countercultural exploration. Beatnik Christianity categorically rejects Western conceptions of original sin and leans hard into Eastern conceptions of ancestral sin. This in turn enables Beatnik Christianity to harmonize with sacred humanism without all the cognitive dissonance faced by the original Christian humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam in the 15th and 16th centuries.
So, what is sacred humanism? It’s the belief that we are truly able to reflect our Creator. Because humanity is unique among the rest of creation in having been made in God’s own image, we have immense potential to love deeply, think critically, serve others, create art, enjoy sex, revel in the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and so forth. It’s about truly embracing God’s image by consciously, if always imperfectly, striving to live into the fullness of our humanity. It’s about cleaning the smudged image, thereby restoring God’s original purposes for His beloved children.
The original beatniks were known for hedonistic excess. They had quite the reputation when it came to cultural non-conformity, sexual liberation, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, exploration of Eastern religions, and so forth. When I think of their legacy, however, two songs intersect in my mind: U2‘s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and Switchfoot‘s “New Way to Be Human.” No doubt there was a lot of simple youthful rebellion in the Beat Generation, but I think some of them really were seeking something akin to sacred humanism.
