A friend asked me yesterday, "What is sin?" In response I said, "Sin is a no-thing. It is the absence of the good, because it is an absence of God". In expounding what I meant by that statement, I began to formulate some ideas about sin. Here are some of those ideas:
1. Reinhold Niebuhr famously said sin is perhaps the only verifiable theological claim. He was wrong. I know why his claim gets traction -- in no less than CS Lewis' Mere Christianity: The omnipresent reality of self-alienation and social disorder. But sin is a theologoumenon, and, like all theologoumena, it is a matter of faith, not disinterested observation. To be specific, sin is a matter of faith because, definitively, it's a disruption between human beings and God -- and the knowledge of God is itself a matter of faith. Sin is the suffered absence of God, which can only be known as a grace itself, in faith.
2. What is the nature of that disruption? Right from the start, it's disobedience. "The Lord God commanded" (Genesis 2.16). And we did not do as we were told -- for our own good. We humans have transgressed every "thou shalt not ..." we have been given. So, sin is the no-thing we have created; it is the cancer that eats at created life made by God as a grace. As Paul interprets Genesis 2 in Romans 5, the key terms are Adam’s παράβασις and παρακοή and, in contrast, Christ’s ύπακοή. It is precisely as the obedient one that Jesus is the sinless one. "God with us", the Obedient One, names what human living is really like. Adam, the Disobedient One, names fallen living, this living in disobedience that creates its own death and destruction. Sin is the cancer that eats at human striving, and as the great No-thing, sin leads into death, into No-thing-ness.
3. So, then, do I take the story of Genesis 2 to be "history"? No more than I take the three-story universe of Genesis 1 to be "science". So the story of the fall isn't true? Don't be silly! Only a discredited logical positivism would reduce truth to the "facts" of history and science, quite apart from the issues of contructivism and perspectivism. The falls of Genesis (they merely begin in Genesis 2, but continue throughout the story!) is neither a timeless idea nor a chronological moment but a pre-historical narrative disclosure of the way it is with you and me. The falls of Genesis are a foil to the history of humanity. If you want to see what it's like not to be human, look at Genesis. If you want to see what it's like to be human, look at Jesus.
4. This notion -- the fall-as-foil -- intends to avoid two twin errors common in Christian faith. The Bible knows no sinless humanity, and comparably no state of innocence. The fall is not a fall in the sense that we've somehow become something other than we were before it. There is no "pre-commandment human being" (Brueggemann). Because there is no pre-disobedient human being. Neither is the story in Genesis aetiology. There is no biblical explanation for sin, because sin itself is absurd. Sin is irrational, non-necessary, inexplicable. Read Kierkegaard.
5. After disobedience, there are several contenders for the clown crown of foundational sin. Unbelief and pride feature prominently in the history of harmatology. Karl Barth, the theologian of grace, appropriately accents ingratitude. In Thomas Mann's disturbing retelling of the Faust legend Doctor Faustus, the satanic counter-commandment is "Thou shalt not love". (This is Sartre's "Hell is other people" in No Exit.) And to add to the witches' brew, consider Augustine's take on sin as disordered desire (concupiscentia), and Luther's take on the sinner as homo incurvatus in se.
6. Whatever sin is -- and it is no doubt the absence of so many things (the good, the true, the beautiful) -- it now infects more than human living. All of creation "groans" for its redemption (Romans 8). This, I think, is what we Christians really mean by "total depravity". It is less Calvin's notion, developed thanks to Augustine, that we are completely without any image of God remaining. Instead, "total depravity" names the situation in which this cancer grows: We, and all the world, is now bound to sin. Rather than singling out the will (contra Erasmus) or the mind (contra Origen), sin resides in every part of the world, not just in humans. But this cancer is known most clearly in the death and destruction of human living named by Paul as sarx. Read Romans 7. "Total depravity" means that all our human striving for the good is bound to go wrong. There is no privileged part of us that can efficiently bring about salvation. As grace goes all the way down in God, so this cancer goes all the way down in creation, in humans, and in me.
7. So the Pauline anatomy of sin rightly has us distinguishing between sin and sins. Sin is not so much my moral failing, as often as I fail morally. Sin names that absence of the good in which I am enslaved toward destroying my own life and the life of all creation. This, I think, is why Paul never speaks of "the forgiveness of sins", but instead of sin's defeat and conquest. Romans 8, again. Sin is defeated only by Jesus Christ and humanity's re-creation in life in him. (This is why, I think, Paul connects Jesus' obedience in Romans 5 with our baptism in Romans 6.) It takes the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus to cure the cancer of sin, to obliterate this no-thing and its no-thing-ness by bringing life to all creation. It takes grace to reveal the real human condition. Paul deduced our real plight from the real solution, Jesus.
8. You know the phrase "ugly as sin"? Whenever I think of sin, I picture Ducco's "Temptation of Christ on the Mountain":
Or I catch a whiff of Luther's "shitty" Satan. Thing is, how can we be tempted by something so utterly repulsive? Consider, then, the film The Devil's Advocate (1997), in which Al
Pacino plays a Lucifer whose attractiveness contributes as much as his
corporate clout to his persuasiveness. His text might come from the
Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil": "Please allow me to introduce
myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste". Sin is no Ugly Betty. It may be the absence of the beautiful, but its appearance is appealing.
9. That's because Satan is a liar. He makes sin seem so exciting, both as lust and as the lure of power. "Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing", Screwtape tells Wormwood in CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters. That's because sin itself is always unoriginal, recycled, predictable, dead boring. Sin is The Same Old Thing. Satan is so streetwise as a prosecuting attorney -- though really more like an old man with a bad memory (or maybe a gullible teenager) -- so that we're always falling for the provocative promises that end in no-thing. So maybe WC Fields was right: "There's a sucker born every minute". (And maybe this is why the best antidote for sin is humor: Like all tyrants, the devil insists on being taken so seriously, so maybe we just need to take the piss and remove that sting.)
10. Finally, the most important pastoral point to make about sin: Known sin is always forgiven sin (Karl Barth). We can't know ourselves as sinner apart from knowing Jesus. This is why so much fire-and-brimestone preaching goes the way of all dying dust. Real repentance cannot grow in the rocky soil of debilitating shame. Forgiveness, instead, is the homecoming, the healing, the acceptance. It is a sheer act of joy precisely because it is a grace. So, if you're preaching sin, stop. Preach grace. Preach Jesus. We must know him first, before we may name our sin.
1. Reinhold Niebuhr famously said sin is perhaps the only verifiable theological claim. He was wrong. I know why his claim gets traction -- in no less than CS Lewis' Mere Christianity: The omnipresent reality of self-alienation and social disorder. But sin is a theologoumenon, and, like all theologoumena, it is a matter of faith, not disinterested observation. To be specific, sin is a matter of faith because, definitively, it's a disruption between human beings and God -- and the knowledge of God is itself a matter of faith. Sin is the suffered absence of God, which can only be known as a grace itself, in faith.
2. What is the nature of that disruption? Right from the start, it's disobedience. "The Lord God commanded" (Genesis 2.16). And we did not do as we were told -- for our own good. We humans have transgressed every "thou shalt not ..." we have been given. So, sin is the no-thing we have created; it is the cancer that eats at created life made by God as a grace. As Paul interprets Genesis 2 in Romans 5, the key terms are Adam’s παράβασις and παρακοή and, in contrast, Christ’s ύπακοή. It is precisely as the obedient one that Jesus is the sinless one. "God with us", the Obedient One, names what human living is really like. Adam, the Disobedient One, names fallen living, this living in disobedience that creates its own death and destruction. Sin is the cancer that eats at human striving, and as the great No-thing, sin leads into death, into No-thing-ness.
3. So, then, do I take the story of Genesis 2 to be "history"? No more than I take the three-story universe of Genesis 1 to be "science". So the story of the fall isn't true? Don't be silly! Only a discredited logical positivism would reduce truth to the "facts" of history and science, quite apart from the issues of contructivism and perspectivism. The falls of Genesis (they merely begin in Genesis 2, but continue throughout the story!) is neither a timeless idea nor a chronological moment but a pre-historical narrative disclosure of the way it is with you and me. The falls of Genesis are a foil to the history of humanity. If you want to see what it's like not to be human, look at Genesis. If you want to see what it's like to be human, look at Jesus.
4. This notion -- the fall-as-foil -- intends to avoid two twin errors common in Christian faith. The Bible knows no sinless humanity, and comparably no state of innocence. The fall is not a fall in the sense that we've somehow become something other than we were before it. There is no "pre-commandment human being" (Brueggemann). Because there is no pre-disobedient human being. Neither is the story in Genesis aetiology. There is no biblical explanation for sin, because sin itself is absurd. Sin is irrational, non-necessary, inexplicable. Read Kierkegaard.
5. After disobedience, there are several contenders for the clown crown of foundational sin. Unbelief and pride feature prominently in the history of harmatology. Karl Barth, the theologian of grace, appropriately accents ingratitude. In Thomas Mann's disturbing retelling of the Faust legend Doctor Faustus, the satanic counter-commandment is "Thou shalt not love". (This is Sartre's "Hell is other people" in No Exit.) And to add to the witches' brew, consider Augustine's take on sin as disordered desire (concupiscentia), and Luther's take on the sinner as homo incurvatus in se.
6. Whatever sin is -- and it is no doubt the absence of so many things (the good, the true, the beautiful) -- it now infects more than human living. All of creation "groans" for its redemption (Romans 8). This, I think, is what we Christians really mean by "total depravity". It is less Calvin's notion, developed thanks to Augustine, that we are completely without any image of God remaining. Instead, "total depravity" names the situation in which this cancer grows: We, and all the world, is now bound to sin. Rather than singling out the will (contra Erasmus) or the mind (contra Origen), sin resides in every part of the world, not just in humans. But this cancer is known most clearly in the death and destruction of human living named by Paul as sarx. Read Romans 7. "Total depravity" means that all our human striving for the good is bound to go wrong. There is no privileged part of us that can efficiently bring about salvation. As grace goes all the way down in God, so this cancer goes all the way down in creation, in humans, and in me.
7. So the Pauline anatomy of sin rightly has us distinguishing between sin and sins. Sin is not so much my moral failing, as often as I fail morally. Sin names that absence of the good in which I am enslaved toward destroying my own life and the life of all creation. This, I think, is why Paul never speaks of "the forgiveness of sins", but instead of sin's defeat and conquest. Romans 8, again. Sin is defeated only by Jesus Christ and humanity's re-creation in life in him. (This is why, I think, Paul connects Jesus' obedience in Romans 5 with our baptism in Romans 6.) It takes the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus to cure the cancer of sin, to obliterate this no-thing and its no-thing-ness by bringing life to all creation. It takes grace to reveal the real human condition. Paul deduced our real plight from the real solution, Jesus.
8. You know the phrase "ugly as sin"? Whenever I think of sin, I picture Ducco's "Temptation of Christ on the Mountain":
9. That's because Satan is a liar. He makes sin seem so exciting, both as lust and as the lure of power. "Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing", Screwtape tells Wormwood in CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters. That's because sin itself is always unoriginal, recycled, predictable, dead boring. Sin is The Same Old Thing. Satan is so streetwise as a prosecuting attorney -- though really more like an old man with a bad memory (or maybe a gullible teenager) -- so that we're always falling for the provocative promises that end in no-thing. So maybe WC Fields was right: "There's a sucker born every minute". (And maybe this is why the best antidote for sin is humor: Like all tyrants, the devil insists on being taken so seriously, so maybe we just need to take the piss and remove that sting.)
10. Finally, the most important pastoral point to make about sin: Known sin is always forgiven sin (Karl Barth). We can't know ourselves as sinner apart from knowing Jesus. This is why so much fire-and-brimestone preaching goes the way of all dying dust. Real repentance cannot grow in the rocky soil of debilitating shame. Forgiveness, instead, is the homecoming, the healing, the acceptance. It is a sheer act of joy precisely because it is a grace. So, if you're preaching sin, stop. Preach grace. Preach Jesus. We must know him first, before we may name our sin.