The Unit of Analysis

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 03.05.2017

Scripture Lesson:  Romans 5:12-19

Nothing makes life easier than categorical thinking.  It’s one of the things that human beings do well, and we do it almost without thinking.

These assumptions are based on a set of general sociocultural categories, which I use to interpret and make sense of the world around me.  We used to use them to quickly assess our world.  We understood that plants that looked a certain way were likely in an edible category.  This was useful.  Or, when encountering a strange animal for the first time, we could assess it relative to a prior knowledge base.  Large?  Check.  Forward facing eyes?  Clearly a hunter.  Large, sharp teeth and claws?  Definitely a hunter.  Moving slowly towards me in a coiled crouch like it’s ready to spring?  Perhaps it’s time to aaaaargh.

Categorical thinking can be helpful, because it lets you make quick survival decisions.

But it can also be problematic.  Because as we group other human beings into neatly definable categories, we stop seeing them as persons.  They become a proxy for another encounter, perhaps, a stand in for someone else we have known rather than someone completely unique.  Or they become representatives of a set, defined more by the features of that set than they are by their own characteristics as a person.  We encounter them, and what we see is not that person, but a set of characteristics that we believe tell us...already...everything we need to know.  

It is convenient, it is easy, but it is the heart of human bias.  Just because a person reminds us of someone else, or seems to bear the features of a particular subset of human being, that doesn’t mean that we are right in applying those labels to our view of that person.

Take, for example, an article in the most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, which highlighted the work of a group of researchers considering how to eliminate subliminal racial bias among AirBnB hosts.  AirBnb is a recent business, in which individuals who own a home open it up to paying guests.  What’s been found is that there’s significant evidence of racial bias in whether or not a host chooses to accept a guest, as hosts use pictures and even the names of their guests to come to quick...and often racially biased...decisions about who to host.  

Researchers from Indiana University and Michigan University conducted a study in which those hosts were presented with a series of names, each of potential guests.  Some of those names were what the researchers considered “white,” and others “black.”  What they found was that bias was clear and present, with a twenty percent increase in the denial rate for “black” names, when the name was the only real indicator.  They also found that if there was more information...either a generic good review of a guest or a bad review of a guest...the bias disappeared.  Once a host saw that guest as more of an individual, as a person and not representative of a category, they acted on relevant rather than irrelevant data.  The study was both grim...in that it showed bigotry to still be a potent force in our culture...and hopeful, in that it showed that it can be wiped away once we view each person for who they actually are.

The unit of analysis, as we consider the moral integrity...the goodness...of the human beings we encounter, should be no more and no less than the reality of that person.  

We should not judge all people together, or based on assumptions that derive from a prior experience.  This, I think, we can all agree upon.

So from that shared assumption, what in the Sam Hill are we supposed to do with this little section in Romans?

Paul’s letter to the church at Rome is the high water mark of Paul’s theology.  It’s written to a church that he did not personally know, and so he...well...he’s showing off a little bit.  Bringing his A game, to demonstrate to a group of strangers that, yes, in fact, he did know what he was talking about.

It’s the scriptural equivalent of a job interview for that position that would totally be a step up, or that first date with a girl you’ve been crushing on for the last six months.  No pressure.  None.

What Paul produced in his letter to Rome has helped shape Christian theology for the last several thousand years, and much of that...like the idea that what matters is God’s grace, that we have no right to look down on others no matter how much it might make us feel righteous, or that the very heart of the Christian ethical path is love...is pretty easy to grok to.  But here, well, here in this passage I tend to wrestle a little bit, because Paul is at the point of presenting his assumption about the nature of human brokenness.

Why are human beings all unworthy?  Because of Adam.  Meaning, every single person, everywhere, is culpable for that one time when this one guy snuck some food God had asked him not to eat.  

To be honest, I’ve always wrestled with this as a point of theology, particularly if we understand sin…”Original sin”...as deriving from the single action of a single individual.  Meaning, as we read through this densely worded, circuitous bit of Greco-Roman rhetoric, that there is the assumption that every human person can be viewed through the lenses of a single act of disobedience.

How does that work, exactly?  It has always felt, if read a certain way, that there’s an unfairness to the assumption that every soul should be held accountable for the actions of a single other.  It feels, frankly, unfair.

My actions should have no impact on how you are judged.  Your actions, being your own, should not reflect on me, if I can have no influence over them.

Yet here we have what...on one reading...seems like a desperately unfair bias against individual persons, and it is persons...not categories, not groupings...that are the fundamental moral unit of analysis.   

When we read through the prophets, we hear that it is persons who are judged for what they do.  Speaking with the voice and authority of God, Ezekiel and Jeremiah essentially say, no, that way of thinking has nothing to do with the way God works.

When we hear the stories of the life of Jesus, we hear that he refused to let bias against persons take precedence over their response to his message.  It didn’t matter if you were a leper or a prostitute, a tax-collector or a Syrophonecian or an officer in the foreign army that was occupying Judah.  He treated everyone as a person, to be judged on their own merits.  The individual was the unit of analysis.

This seems in rather significant tension with Romans 5.   

How to resolve this?  Can it be resolved?  I tend to find my peace with the idea of the Fall by understanding Adam as signifying all of humankind.   Because the name adam, in Hebrew...which the Jewish Paul with his rabbinic training would have known...means “creature of earth.”   He is life, drawn from the dust and dirt and soil.   I view the story of the Fall as an archetypal expression of our universal human resistance to God's grace and our calling to care for one another, a reminder that we are both mortal and imperfect.  

This last Wednesday, we started our Lenten journey by reminding ourselves that we are all creatures of dust and ashes, that every human being is made of the stuff of earth, and to it we shall return.

That knowledge is meant to humble us, and to remind us to stand against the biases and bigotries that we use to divide ourselves from others.  That is the point of this season of discipline, the point of the path of Jesus.  Every soul we encounter stands on equal ground, and that...that is the reason we treat every person with honor and respect.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.