Piety Unbroken by Laughter Spills Blood

I just recently read the graphic novel Watchmen and saw the movie. (If gratuitous violence and sex offend you, stick to the book and avoid the movie. Apart from those excesses, the movie is actually a pretty faithful adaptation.) My wife encouraged me to write a blog post on it, which I’m assuming she did because she got tired of hearing me talk about it all the time and wanted me to redirect it to someone else. So this post is in part an effort to be a more considerate spouse.

(No spoilers anticipated.)

Watchmen rules. It's probably one of my all time favorite works of fiction. It’s a super(anti)hero comic book story about what the world would look like if people in real life traipsed around in costumes taking the law into their own hands. The book has a lot to say about politics, philosophy, ethics and psychology, and Alan Moore designed each of the six main characters to represent six different ways of viewing the world. I’d like to address one issue raised by two of those characters: Rorschach and The Comedian.

Philosophically, the two characters are mirror opposites of each other. Rorschach believes in moral absolutes; the world is comprised of clear-cut distinctions between good and evil. His mask, an inkblot pattern that constantly changes shape, seems to symbolize this. Life is black and white, and while the boundaries between right and wrong continuously flow into and displace each other, blacks and whites absolutely never mix into greys. He is willing to operate as an illegal superhero, savagely torture people who have information he needs and kill evildoers in a variety of colorful ways, as long as it means achieving retributive justice in the end.

The Comedian, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in anything. As you can infer from his name, he thinks life is a joke. He is a superhero because it’s fun, he kills innocent people because he can, he sees no existential difference between the just and the unjust, and he’s a devoted crime fighter even though he thinks the efforts of superheroes are futile in effecting any real change.


What’s interesting is how similar they are when it comes to how they live. Both are merciless killers who will go greater lengths than other superheroes in violently suppressing enemies. They don’t get along well with others, but they do have considerable respect for each other. And they’re both sociopaths. This reminds me of the great lesson learned about the alliance between the Nazis and the Soviets in World War II: the extremes of two opposing ideologies end up having more in common with each other than with anyone in the middle. As Bryce is fond of pointing out, the political spectrum looks more like a horseshoe than a straight line.


I’m interested in the relationship between righteousness and laughter. To me they are like opposing forces: righteousness is very serious, heavy matter, and laughter is as light as air. Righteousness should ground laughter with meaning and laughter should teach righteousness to loosen up a bit. But one with out the other is insanity. Rorschach never laughs and The Comedian never uses “ought” language. They are both sociopaths because they each live out unmixed commitments to either righteousness or laughter.

It might seem counterintuitive, but a life of pure piety is deadly. John Caputo says in Against Ethics, “Piety unbroken by laughter spills blood. Excommunication, extermination, execution, exile, exclusion, extra ecclesia nulla salus est [There is no salvation outside the Church]: that is the outcome of pure piety and of preoccupation with saving powers.” (I will proclaim boldly, without caveat, that Against Ethics is the single most satisfying work of philosophy I have ever read.) We tend to forget that the Spanish Inquisition came out of a time of rekindled interest in Catholic spirituality and holiness, and that purifying Europe of foreign, contaminating elements flowed from the same urge to renew Christianity. It was concomitant with a golden age of Spanish spirituality (St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila). A similar kind of spiritual revival impelled the 12th century Crusaders. So Rorschach’s brutality is not a dismissible symptom of a pathological love of violence—it has its eye on justice itself.

Uninhibited laughter is no less disturbing. The Comedian’s freewheeling, carefree life of hedonistic laughter is the consummate expression of individual autonomy. No kind of external obligation hinders him—his rule of life is auto- (self) nomy (rule) in the strictest sense. Laughter is as light as air, but even the highest mountain can’t stop the wind; it’s frictionless. Balancing his point against purebred piety, Caputo says, “In certain situations free agency should be made to tremble. When agents produce patients, people who suffer, I want to let agency waver in insecurity, to let autonomy and spontaneity and creativity and freedom feel their own murderousness—instead of singing hymns to them”.

I wish there was some account of Jesus laughing in the gospels (I appreciate The Passion of the Christ, if for no other reason than that it showed Jesus making a joke). Even though laughter is not mentioned specifically, I think Jesus’ way of life embodied the right mixture of laughter and piety. He made fun of and publicly embarrassed the Pharisees for taking themselves so seriously, but he also stood in righteous silence before the sardonic laughter of the Roman guards. As for me, most days I can’t decide whether I should put on sackcloth or just laugh. Trying to live out both is a difficult balance to strike. Maybe that’s why there don’t seem to be any good Christian comedians out there.

Barack Obama Will Not Be a Christian President (Politics Conversation, 1 of 4)

There is something I have been reluctant to confess publicly. I have tried to submit to the generally optimistic mood recently, the optimism concerning the prospect of electing such a dramatically different man from the Current Occupant—and not just a dramatically different man; a dramatically different, Christian man. Many Christian liberals and progressives are feeling the premonitions of a New Day coming, a day when a man will be put in office who understands and can give voice to the Christian concern for poverty, a man who demonstrates spellbinding, riveting philosophical acumen and theological sensitivity when discussing (heretofore) impenetrably difficult issues like homosexuality and abortion (The nuance, O the nuance! How we sing thy praise!), yes, a man who at one point was so impervious to cultural whims about noncommittal displays of patriotism that he even refused to wear a flag pin!

But I fear I cannot submit to this optimism any longer. True, I was even for a time a leader in the front lines of the troops of optimism, that veritable Army of Hope, only six months ago. But I can no longer wave that flag, the flag I waved when I phone banked for the Democrat during the Texas primaries (But Barack Obama could be that Christian President we’ve been praying for!...[click]). My confession is this: I fear Barack Obama will not in fact be a Christian President if he is elected next week.*

This is because the very epithet “Christian President” has already begun to collapse in on itself, even before Mr. Obama arrived on the scene. There are a couple of ways I could describe the incommensurability of the concepts “Christian” and “President”. I could take one route, the one William T. Cavanaugh takes, and trace the genealogy of the modern state back to its genesis in the 17th century as a struggle between an imperialistic, totalizing national State and the other social bodies that stood in its way (feudal hierarchies, trade guilds, the church). The invention of modern “human rights” was a brilliant act of thaumaturgy that guaranteed civilians something they already had under feudal arrangements, and the expanding liberal state sold the idea as a way to undercut the legitimacy of these other social bodies. Perhaps more importantly, the rise of “universal human rights” happened to coincide with the rise of the state’s monopoly on violence—human rights were merely a way for the state to cash in on its own prize to itself. In this line of thinking, the church and the modern state are therefore inherently at odds with one another, and Christians must chose sides, drive their boot heels into the ground and defend the integrity of the church against the state’s unceasing megalomania.

Or perhaps we do not have to go that far; perhaps we do not have to accuse Mr. Obama of being an unwitting actor in an unfolding drama that has already been scripted for him. Maybe we can instead take him at his own word. In a 2006 speech on faith and politics, Mr. Obama described the difficulty of carrying one’s faith commitments and political commitments simultaneously. Whereas politics is the art of the possible, marked by an appreciation for compromise and negotiation, religion is the art of the impossible, he said.

Abraham was righteous precisely because he threw himself at the feet of a call that made absolutely no sense. Jesus calls us to turn the other cheek, even though it is an open invitation for someone to come in and be a tyrant. But how much room is there for the impossible when you have already been sworn into an arena where the “possible” is played, and played exclusively? Is there much elbow room in a Senate packed with lobbyists’ money?

Christians must bear witness to the impossible by living according to radical hospitality and forgiveness in a world that takes victims that are not even hospitable or forgiving. Christians invite thieves into their homes even when their valuables are within easy reach. Christians give away money to causes even when it will empty their bank accounts. Christians do not even shoot back at the man who has just taken the lives of five of their little girls.

So what is so Christian about threatening to invade Pakistan because of reason to believe terrorists are hiding there? What is so Christian about sending billions in military aid instead of humanitarian and development aid to a country already as war-torn as Afghanistan? What is so Christian about throwing immigrants back across the border to countries we have helped keep in perpetual poverty? Is there any room for the impossible to budge—even just a little—in an Oval Office beset on every side by guns, dirty money and the ephemeral tides of populism? It would be nice to think that there is, but one can understand the pessimism of someone like myself who has seen the United States government act one way and one way only in his lifetime. If politicians will not bear witness to the impossible, then are we to leave them to their own devices so we can do a better job ourselves, so that the Amish are not the only ones still concerned with peace? I do not know.

*Do not read this confession as a suggestion that the integrity of Mr. Obama's faith should be doubted or that I will not vote for him. I will, gladly.

Poverty and Salvation (A Response and a Lead-In)

This is in part a response to an astute point made by Matt Duff on one of Bryce’s previous posts, “The Elusive Ecclesiological Jaguar Shark (Church Hunting, pt. 2)” (October 6, 2008), and it is also in part a lead-in to a Church-and-Politics conversation we’ll be starting later on in the week.

Matt raised some valid points on not overemphasizing the importance of caring for the poor as an integral part of the church's mission. I agree that if we flatten the mission of the church to such a degree that all we are is a food bank we forfeit much of the dynamism of what it means to be a spiritual community. (Not to mention we risk failing at trying to do something that food banks are already doing competently.)

Matt, could I press back against your objections just a bit, and try to articulate why I think attentiveness to poverty and suffering is so important? Since this is a complex issue, and one we certainly can't iron out in a single sitting, I’ll limit myself to two points made by one of my favorite theologians, Gustavo Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest regarded as the father of liberation theology, and made a splash in the early 1970s as a theologian trying to make sense of what it meant for the Catholic Church to seek to give its members spiritual nourishment and yet do nothing to resist oppressive Latin American dictatorships that drove Christians into material and spiritual despair. The movement became well known on a popular level in the late 1980s by the film Romero, a true story about a Salvadorian bishop who was assassinated for standing up to his country’s gross violations of human rights. (A superb and convicting film, by the way. I highly recommend it.)

1. "Salvation history is a single history". What Gutiérrez means by this is that there is not a physical, worldly human story and a spiritual, immaterial story, which can be interwoven at times but are essentially distinct. Rather, there is a single story because humans are not merely ghostly souls trapped in material bodies. Human personhood--according to Hebrew thought and increasingly according to recent neuroscience and philosophy of mind--is certainly a multifaceted phenomenon, but not a cleanly bifurcated one. The spiritual is bound up with the material, and vice versa. Jesus came both healing the sick and casting out demons; he came forgiving sins as well as denouncing exploitation by tax collectors. The mission of Christ was to save bodies as well as souls, and in the end we will be raised from the dead in body as well as in spirit. So I suspect that the urge to downplay material nourishment for the sake of more lasting spiritual nourishment might be working from an artificial distinction.

I was in Ghana once with a group of (relatively affluent) American and Ghanaian Christians who went to an abjectly poor village to preach the Gospel. The members of the village had no plumbing or nearby water source, and had to walk a mile to get water from a standing pond that was visibly contaminated. Half of the kids in the village died by the age of five, and half of the kids that did survive had tapeworms. I wanted to ask, Why don't we buy and install a water well for them at the same time that we preach the Gospel? Wouldn't it be better if more children had the sanitation to grow old and have children of their own, so that the church may be larger and more vibrant? Then we could witness to salvation the way Gutiérrez understands it--a salvation that "concerns all men and the whole of man".

I don’t mean to tell that story to unfairly overstate my case. I do think it is important to recognize the integrity of spiritual and material health, however, and if we should be more consistent in Ghana I think we should be more consistent all the way down the line and apply it to our own churches and to how holistically we conceive of salvation.

2. "The center of the world--so-called because the crucified Jesus dwells there, and with him all who suffer unjustly--is the place from which we must proclaim the risen Lord."

Wanting to be in community with the poor shouldn't be some special treatment we give to one group of people at the expense of another. I agree with Matt that we shouldn't assume that the wealthy don't have needs and privilege the poor out of some disingenuous middle-class guilt. It should go without saying that being wealthy does not preclude a person from a need for spiritual nourishment—when I say suffering I mean suffering of all kinds, including despair, addiction and rejection as well as not being able to afford heating in the winter. This should not be about class warfare and it should not be about base materialism. However, the reason we want to be in community with the poor and suffering is because, like Bryce said, it is a gift. We are better off spiritually when we are nearer to hurt and pain, just as Jesus says, "blessed are the poor" and "blessed are those who mourn". We should be suspicious of the health-and-wealth gospels of the likes of Joel Osteen, which mislead people into thinking that following Jesus is about being happy rather than about taking up our cross. Likewise, we should be weary of church membership that only rounds out our already comfortable lives.

Matt rightly said there is no causation between wealth and righteousness, but it seems to me like Jesus is implying there is causation between poverty and righteousness. He even goes as far as saying it is harder for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. This is obvious hyperbole, to be sure, but the fact that Jesus gives caution to the extremely rich should at least suggest that there is some causal link between material comfort and spiritual complacence.

I realize I’m setting up a tension here that could easily be interpreted as a contradiction--on one hand I'm saying it's good to hurt, on the other I'm saying we should help those who hurt so they don’t hurt anymore. I think we can live into both sides of this tension in a single motion. We should say to those who suffer, “you are blessed”, while at the same time not letting that be an excuse not to offer a helping hand. We should seek to help the hurting, while at the same time not do so in an effort to “fix them” or to narcissistically recreate them in our own image. As hard as it might seem to do this with integrity, I’m convinced it is what we are call to do, and we have Jesus’ life as an example to follow.

Again, thanks for your comments, Matt, and thanks for stimulating and provoking me into thought. You don’t have to apologize for your lengthy comment, since I’ve obviously overindulged in my own, lengthier response. And feel free to respond with profuse and even lengthier disagreement if you like.

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A Concluding Confessional Caveat

I do not purport to be in any fashion an accomplished 'liberation theologian in practice'. As I write this post I become increasingly insecure in articulating this position, as I have few concrete credentials to adjudicate my claim that theology must display a 'preferential option for the poor'. I have, for the most part, enjoyed reading and writing about liberation theology from the comfort of my padded and clean office in small-town America, quite far from the suffering poor of Gutiérrez's Lima or Romero's San Salvador. Do not mistake this position as a kind of attempt to put on airs about authority that I do not in fact have; rather, I build this case from what I understand the Gospel to be that is preached to me and that lays claim to me. So if I have any say left in the matter, I ask that the reader hear me making a confession of what is still before me, mea culpa, mea culpa.

The Theology of William Young's The Shack

I can’t remember the last time a work of Christian fiction was buzzing on everyone’s lips the way The Shack has been these days (or at least since the Left Behind series). As a testimony to its popularity, I met my grandfather for coffee at a McDonald’s yesterday, and I was reading the book while I waited for him. When he showed up he had the book in hand, and it was only moments before a stranger came to us and asked us where he might get a copy for himself, since he had heard so much about it. So I figured it would be a timely undertaking for this weblog to offer its own humble analysis of the theology that the book espouses.

Possible Spoiler Alert: The editors of the book asked that readers not divulge some key elements of the plot to those who have not read it yet. However, it's nearly impossible to talk about the plot without discussing these.

The story takes place in Portland, Oregon (is this the secret recipe for a book guaranteed to fly off the shelves of Christian bookstores?), where family man Mackenzie Phillips is wrestling with a cloud of depression that descended upon him four years prior, when his six-year-old daughter was brutally murdered by a serial killer during a family camping trip. One day he mysteriously receives an unstamped letter in his mailbox, from God, inviting him to spend the weekend with him in a dilapidated shack in the Oregon wilderness—which happens to be where Mackenzie’s daughter was murdered. When he arrives, he is surprised to find the murder site transformed into an idyllic log cabin with a perfectly manicured lawn, and is greeted by an ethnically colorful personification of the Trinity: God the Father is revealed as a large, jovial black woman—who will surely be played by Queen Latifah when the movie adaptation comes out; Jesus is a 21st century version of himself—an Israeli manual laborer in a token blue jumpsuit; and the Holy Spirit is apparently played by a character from the creepy British children’s show Boobah. What ensues is a weekend of theological conversation and moments of revelation between Mackenzie and each of the three members of the Trinity, wherein God gets a chance to explain him/herself to the troubled, doubting protagonist.

The book’s primary concern is the timeless theological dilemma of the problem of evil: how can an all-loving and all-powerful God allow senseless suffering to run so rampant in the world? In today’s scene of hard Calvinism making such a startling comeback in all kinds of church circles, I found Young’s depiction of God refreshing and hopeful. Young portrays God, not as a puppet master who orchestrates tragedy to show us a lesson about his sovereignty or to create situations that will force us to grow, but as a God who suffers alongside his creation and values relationship with his children above micromanagement.

The difference between Calvinism and Young’s argument is the difference between de facto and de jure understandings of God’s sovereignty. In de facto sovereignty, God is directly behind all activity in the universe—no matter how seemingly insignificant or evil—and every event works in accordance with his will. Whereas de facto refers to what actually is the case, de jure refers to what is “by right” or “by law”; God might not be controlling every detail, but all of creation rightfully belongs to its Creator and awaits the day it will be redeemed back to him/her. To affirm God’s sovereignty, then, is to have faith in God’s ability to redeem the most senseless situations. This is the revelation that ultimately brings healing to Mackenzie.

The Shack also features interesting discussion on the nature of the Trinity. Free-church Protestants in the past have made topics like soteriology (doctrine of salvation) and eschatology (doctrine of the end-times) their main points of focus, while being content to leave more esoteric Trinitarian speculation to Catholics and Orthodox. It's nice to see the topic take a central place in a book so popular the free-church crowd. (Interestingly, the book supports the peculiar doctrine of patripassianism: the historically heretical belief that the Father suffered with the Son on the cross and bears the same wounds.)

For those of you who noticed Eugene Peterson’s blurb on the front cover lauding the book as today’s equivalent of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, I wouldn’t go in with such high hopes. While The Shack’s theology can be winning at times, the writing, lamentably, is not. (Will there ever be a return to great Christian fiction, a return to the days when we could claim great writers like Dante and Dostoyevsky? Or is there plenty out there and I just haven’t come across it yet?) The dialogue is quite stilted at times, with characters set up to deliver theological quips seemingly on queue. It’s a bit like watching a 2nd grade Thanksgiving pageant, with students lined up in a row behind the microphone, each taking his turn to uncomfortably say his line and hurry back to his place in the chorus. And the book is more than a little touchy-feely. Everyone refers to God as “Papa”, and Jesus and “Papa” greet each other with a kiss on the lips—and this is after he/she has morphed back from God the Mother into the familiar Father (an old white guy).

As far as the theology goes, the book makes some very important arguments about the nature of God that, I think, are very needed today. Young’s God is pluralistic, relational, non-manipulative, able to experience pain, and at times something of a hippy. We need an injection of this kind of theology in a time when influential people like John Piper are preaching that the 2004 tsunami that claimed a quarter of a million lives was God's way of calling the world to repentance. If what you’re mainly looking for is an inspired work of fiction, however, you might stick with the New York Times Book Review. But then again, my schooling is in theology, not literature, so my expertise is not in this area. Please, let us know what you thought of the book, even if you think I’m totally off.

Moses Deconstructed (Prolegomenon)

The following is an act of outright plagiarism of CUNY professor emeritus of philosophy Edith Wyschogrod and her article, "Eating the Text, Defiling the Hands." The weblogger will move seamlessly in and out of Wyschogrod's text so as to create uncertainty regarding the authorship of ideas, effectively resulting in a boosting of credit in the weblogger's favor and at the expense of Wyschogrod's good name.

Moses descended from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets in hand, and happened upon the scene of the greatest act of blasphemy in human history. The Israelites had given up their finest jewelry for Aaron to melt down and fashion into a golden calf. It was a beautiful calf, the people were pleased, and they said, "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." It looked exactly like this:

Moses, who, as we all know, wrote the book of Exodus in real time, as it was happening (this is how he managed to write his own epitaph - he wrote it as he was dying), had only to scroll back to Chapter 20, verses 2-3, to perceive that something was awry: "I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Moses did an on-the-fly synchronic textual analysis of this commandment and the Israelites' above-quoted pronouncement, and identified the polar opposition between the two. Aaron and the Israelites almost seemed to have gone out of their way to invert the First Commandment word for word. Moses was indignant, and he looked exactly like this:

We tend to have either of two reactions to this. Aaron and the Israelites either had a terrible memory, and simply couldn't remember the First Commandment, or Aaron was a great blasphemer who wanted to Stick It To The Man for making them wait so long in the desert.

Then we read a bit more carefully and see that Aaron was a righteous man, and he evidently had the makings of a good pastor. Right after the erection of the calf, Scripture reads, "And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD." The golden calf was raised up in the name of the Lord. The people, weary of merely hearing of God's promises, needed a concrete way to see and experience their God, who was distant from them. Aaron gave them the calf as a visual and imaginative aid to their conception of YHWH, as a sign of hope that their God was real and would fulfill his covenant with them. While this was a good move pastorally for Aaron, he was out of step theologically: In Egypt the Israelites would have been accustomed to seeing grand idols in the Egyptian gods' honor, so showing the grandness of Israel's God through a golden idol would have, in some sense, legitimized YHWH in their eyes. However, YHWH was the imageless God, the God beyond all materiality and all understanding, and Moses knew this. YHWH could not be contained in any human categories, could not be emulated visually, indeed, could not even be named.

We've all heard this before. But here is where I think it gets interesting. (This is an explicitly theological-philosophical reading, not an attempt to capture the "original intent" of the text, pace trained biblical exegetes.) Moses descended Mount Sinai with the two stone tablets - the Very Word of God - in hand, and suddenly realized he was complicit in their sin. The tablets he carried were in effect authoritative representations of God's own will, God's own intentionality. He understood this, and had to act:

And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

Moses and Aaron represent the twin modes of understanding God: Aaron embodies the power of the image, of the phenomenal manifestation of the divine in the physical world; Moses stands for the ideality of God, the law, the words that create understanding of an invisible and unimaginable God. Both men are in the business of bearing and communicating the divine in human categories so that their people may believe. Moses recognized the people's proclivity for idolatry and understood that, if the golden calf had to be dismantled and burned, the tablets must be broken also. The idea of an original set of tablets, an original inscription of God's very words, simply carried too much potential for idolatry. So he smashed them against the rocks and wrote a second copy, so that all would know that the best we can lay claim to is a copy, which is really a copy of a copy.

Which is really a copy of a copy of a copy, right? Moses' breaking of the stones was a symbolic act, the function of which was to underscore the unattainableness of any kind of original foundation that we can confidently seize and claim as our own. Umberto Eco supposedly said somewhere that the universe is like an onion, and an onion is all peel. You peel back layers trying to find a core, but what you get are more layers. We try to peel back the layers of church history to find the "true Christian community" in the primitive church, and then we see that the early church was riddled with problems, and probably didn't have the kind of robust theology we'd like to credit them with. Then we try to peel back layers of Paul's letters to find the manuscripts that contain the best representation of the Apostle's "original intent", and then we realize that he's reflecting on his experience of seeing Christ. So we take it to the gospels. But after enough layer-peeling we realize that it is impossible to access the man of Jesus independent of a shroud of texts - texts layered over texts layered over texts. Matthew and Luke are layered over Mark, Mark's account was layered over Peter's testimony, Peter's testimony is layered with his cultural and historical assumptions (an "archi-text", if you will).

This is not to say that theology is ultimately meaningless since there's no escape from the endless layer-peeling. It is to say, however, that theology is to be found in the layers, in the shifting sands of our finite knowledge. It is the discomfort with layers that results in all our incessant calf-building - materialism, nationalism, humanism, fundamentalism, scientism, individualism, and, the most difficult golden calf to dismantle, our understanding. The orgiastic Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai suddenly look much different when we identify ourselves in them. We are uncomfortable with the uncertainty, the wandering in the desert, the waiting for Moses to descend from the mountain and deliver the goods. Moses will arrive, eventually, and when he does we might be disappointed to find that all he carries are broken tablets, tablets that only defer to what is beyond and behind them, that is, the One who is beyond all names.

...

And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.

Exodus 34:6-7