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Mulhall is absolutely right to see this project of secularizing or formalizing Christian theological resources at work in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein—just as others have discerned something of the same in Marx, Freud, and Derrida. Indeed, Mulhall's essays offer distinctive contributions to these discussions by patiently and carefully showing the way in which Nietzsche repeats his own myth of a "Fall," or the way in which Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations could be plausibly read as a reperformance of Augustine's Confessions. But these secular translations engender two related problems that deserve consideration. First, just what is getting translated? What's taken to be the Christian story that is then reworked and secularized? And second, what happens to the Christian story in that process? Is there something lost in translation? Or as Mulhall asks, "can one say what the Christian has to say about the human condition as fallen, and yet mean it otherwise?"
On the first score, Mulhall falls into just the trap that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein do: conflating fallenness with finitude. The so-called Christian doctrine that is put on the table to be "translated" turns out to not be received catholic orthodoxy, but already some bastardization of the Church's confession. In this case, Mulhall persistently takes it that the doctrine of original sin specifies that the desires of humans are sinfully perverted "by virtue of their very condition as human." In a favorite turn of phrase, Mulhall repeatedly emphasizes that humans are "always already" errant, corrupted, and misdirected. To be human, then, is to be "essentially" sinful, "sinful simply by virtue of being human."
But this is decidedly not the orthodox doctrine of original sin. Rather, what Mulhall give us is an all-too-common Gnostic rendition of it (one which, admittedly, evangelical Protestants are sometimes prone to confuse with the real thing). This is to read the Bible as if it began with the third chapter of Genesis. The paradox is that an orthodox understanding of original sin does not posit sin as properly "original"; that is, it does not regard sinfulness as coincident with being human and finite. And when such a misunderstanding of original sin is coupled with some hope of redemption, we find the contorted philosophical acrobatics that Mulhall finds in Heidegger and Wittgenstein: redemption from this condition of fallenness requires redemption from being human.
What is consistently lacking in these secularized or formalized versions of the Fall is the distinct nuance of the Christian vision, viz., the ability to imagine the world otherwise. Without the prior goodness of creation, there is no Fall. Our present condition is "not the way it's supposed to be," as Cornelius Plantinga so aptly put it. So, too, the doctrine of the eschaton, which enables the Christian story to imagine humanity remaining finite and human but inhabiting the world otherwise. This is why Abraham Kuyper suggested that Christian scientists and scholars would always be "abnormalists," not tempted to confuse our currently observable world with the way things ought to be. To confess with the creed that God is the "maker of heaven and earth," and conclude our confession with the hope of "the resurrection of the dead," is to be able to imagine humanity otherwise while still affirming the finitude and embodiment that are constitutive of being creatures.
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