It is surely long overdue for us to rethink both the theory of divine punishment and the resultant practice of pleading for forgiveness and crying out for mercy throughout the Christian tradition. Instead, we could begin, aside from natural disasters and random accidents, to accept fully the human consequences for what we do, and especially to acknowledge the internal effects of denying our human identity and rejecting our human destiny—as proposed in, say, Genesis 1 and Psalm 8. I
