Free Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood Page A

redeeming the huge Original Sin debt. But individuals must also participate in this drama: in effect, you must redeem yourself by allowing yourself to be redeemed.
    Thus all the souls of the living can be thought of as residing in a pawnshop of the soul, neither entirely slaves nor entirely free. Time is running out. Will you be redeemed before the clock strikes midnight and the Grim Reaper arrives — or, worse, Old Nick in his red suit, ready to pop you into his infernal collecting sack? Hang by your fingertips! It’s never over till it’s over!
    This is what gives the Christian life its dramatic tension: you never know. You never know, that is, unless you’re a believer in the Antinomian Heresy. If you are, you’re so certain of your own salvation that even the most despicable things you do are right, because it’s you doing them. Here’s a summation of this position, taken from a 2005 article in the London Telegraph in which the author, Sam Leith, suggests that Tony Blair, the ex–prime minister of England, was in the grip of this heresy:
Roughly put, antinomianism — and this will have to be roughly put, since I make no claim to be a theologian — is the idea that justification by faith liberates you from the need to do good works. Righteousness overrides the law — which was, arguably, the PM’s position on Iraq.
It can be seen, in some way, as the squaring of a tricky theological circle: the Calvinist idea that the Elect have been singled out for salvation as part of the divine scheme long before any of them were twinkles in the twinkles in their ancestors’ eyes. If justification by faith, rather than by works, is the high road to heaven, the logical extreme of the position is that works don’t matter at all.
Divine grace, over which we have no control, brings about faith. Faith brings about salvation. Ergo, if you’re not touched by grace, there’s nothing much you can do about it except look forward to an immensely long retirement having your toes warmed by the devil in the pitchfork hotel.
If, on the other hand, you are one of the Elect, whoop de doo: Jesus wants you for a sunbeam and no amount of bad behaviour is going to prevent him seeing you right. This is a pretty crazy view to take, most of us would agree, and historically it has tended to be discouraged by both civic and religious authorities for rather obvious reasons. But there it is.
    Since politicians, at least in the English-speaking West, are showing an increasing tendency to drag religion into politics, it would seem fair for the electorate to be able to question them on their own theological views. “Do you believe that you personally are irrevocably saved, that any graft, fraud, lying, torturing, or other criminal activities you may engage in are fully justified because you’re one of the Elect and can do no wrong, that to the pure such as yourself all things are pure, and that the vast majority of those you say you wish to represent as their political leader are vile and worthless and predestined to fry in hell, so why should you give a damn about them?” would seem to be an appropriate lead-off at question time.
    THERE’S A NOVEL that explores the Antinomian Heresy very thoroughly: James Hogg’s 1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner . It’s no coincidence that in this day of holier-than-thou politicians it’s attracting increased critical attention. Here’s the situation: religiously warped by a fanatical mother, sure that he’s predestined to be redeemed, and filled with envy and hatred, specifically for his more attractive brother and his jolly old tippler of a dad, the narrator commits one foul crime after another, led on by a mysterious stranger whom he encounters just when he becomes fully convinced of his own irrevocable membership in the Elect.
    A prop considered necessary in any respectable literary early-modern pact with the Devil is the Infernal Book, for reasons we’ll come to later; and