Too Big to Fail

The mantra that we have recently heard from proponents of the economic recovery plan is that certain institutions are “too big to fail.”  The assumption is that these institutions are so big that if they failed, the whole economy would go into a tailspin. Now let’s think about this for a moment; theologically speaking, is anything too big to fail?   The Bible is devastatingly clear about the fact that nations come and go; they are not too big to fail.  In fact, as much as God seems to love the nation of Israel, not even Israel gets off the hook.   Much of the prophetic literature in the Bible is dedicated to an indictment against the nation God elected to be a light to the nations. Their inability to be a light — that is, to be a righteous, justice-seeking nation — ends in exile.  Even Israel was not too big to fail.

In the big sweep of history, things don’t go much better.  One of the most monumental failures of all times was the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, ending with the sack of Rome by Germanic tribes in 410 CE.  Many folk of the day blamed the fall of Rome on its embrace of “soft” Christian virtues like love, kindness and patience.  St. Augustine argued differently. In his seminal book, The City of God, Augustine argued that Rome’s weakness was actually due to self-worship rather than worship of God.  In other words, Rome was not altogether Christian, so Christianity was hardly the problem.  The real problem was that the Roman Empire was inordinately enamored with its own glory. Rome was not too big to fail.

But Augustine then turned around and committed what some have called an equivalent error by identifying the Kingdom of God too closely with the Church, for this became the basis of the medieval social world based in the sacramental system of the Church, with the Pope as the Vicar of Christ in the world, claiming divine sanction for virtually everything, including power over nations and the sanctioning and deposing earthly kings.  The Church, in other words, came to be considered as too big to fail.   But then the Protestant Reformation came along and suggested that the visible Church cannot be completely identified with the Kingdom of God, and that when you equate these two, the Church can become rather tyrannical.

So from the Protestant perspective, the earthly or institutional Church was not too big to fail, and the net effect of the Protestant Reformation was that individual believers took on more responsibility for religious matters — so much so that people placed a lot of confidence in the power of religion to produce individual virtue.  For many Protestants, virtuous Christian folk were considered the backbone of society.  Christian virtue was thus considered too big to fail.

But when Enlightenment philosophers came along, they pointed out that Protestants were not nearly as virtuous as they claimed to be.  In other words, the religiously virtuous were not too big to fail, and these philosophers suggested that if the individual was freed from oppressive religious ideas and practices, human reason could reign supreme and solve most, if not all, of our human problems.  Well, many folk then thought that things were going along swimmingly (some good things did happen), until it was pointed out that intelligence has the potential for both good and evil and that, in fact, rational science created the technology that made the 20^th century the bloodiest in human history.  In other words, reason was not too big to fail.

All of this raises the question:  is anything in too big to fail?  I suspect we can only truly answer this question in a moment of great fragility, that is, in a moment of economic or social crisis, or death or illness, or when we come to the end of our own virtue.  In such moments we discern the fragility in all we thought was too big to fail.  In such moments we might be inclined to grasp more fully, with ever more might and fervor, the same stuff that we thought was too big to fail – the money that’s left, the few possessions, the few (however fragile) relationships that remain . . .  Or we can despair of any security – life is a “vale of tears,”and that is all there is.  We can, of course, do a little of both.  But there is, I think, one other option.  While I suspect we will never be free completely from grasping or despairing, we can move ever more deeply into faith in the God who is ultimately the only One who is too big to fail – the shelter and refuge spoken of in Psalm 91 — the One ancient people named after the verb “to be” — the One in whom we live and move and have our being.

Psalm 91 is another variation on the truth that ultimately God is our only refuge and help.  There is, to be sure, a rose- colored note in this Psalm, when it suggests that with God as our refuge, “no evil will befall us.”  The fact of the matter is that evil does fall upon us.  But any honest assessment of the human situation discerns that the evil we see and experience stems from a human corruption that is potential and actual is every single one of us.  What the Psalmist affirms here is that no evil can overwhelm God’s good creation, and that good lies before, beneath and after all evil.  This is the kind of faith that we yearn for amid all of our other grasping and despairing.  The only kind of faith that can sustain us.  It is a faith that, theologically speaking, there is only one reality that is too big to fail:  God and God’s intention for the creation – or to put that differently, God and God’s grand plan for the cosmic bailout.

Roger J. Gench