The Little Friar

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 d...

Theologically, I'm pretty pessimistic about human nature.  Think sin and all that.  I don't believe in human progress -- the idea that human history is headed somewhere great.  The Enlightenment notions of being human  aren't that great to me.  Things aren't generally improving.  People, even less so.  The  real problems of life are intractable and almost completely resistant to our flimsy toys of reason, education, therapy, and whatnot.  I'm certain that only thing worth really hoping for is the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.  Temperamentally, though, I'm an outrageous optimist.  I won't be lying if I tell you that I have probably felt optimistic about every human being I ever met.  This drives my wife nuts.  But it's true.  We humans are, to my mind, at best a mixed bag .  There's good to be found in the worst of us, and bad to be found in the best of us.  I say these things i...

The trouble with praying -- my  praying -- is that I sin so often.  And so boldly.  Sin makes it difficult for me to pray.  That's because sinning makes me believe that prayer is so "holy", and I'm so un holy.  Thing is, if I'm sick, it's also difficult to get me to go to the doctor.  So these things really must be related.   But how? From the perspective of despair, sin (and sickness) are an admission of my humanity.  So any seeking of healing -- either in spirit (through prayer) or body (by getting to the doctor) -- confronts my bull-headed notion that I should be complete in myself.  I know enough, I'm "good enough". But am I?  It's interesting to me that Jesus refused  to be called "good".  " No one is good -- except God alone" (Luke 18.19).   No, I'm still too much like the "rich young man".  I depend on justifying myself in the face of rules.  And those rules can always do nothing more than shine a ligh...

From the Baptismal Rite from  The Book of Common Prayer : Question:  Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God? Answer: I renounce them.  Question: Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?  Answer: I renounce them.  Question: Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God? Answer: I renounce them. We don't talk a lot about renunciation in Christianity.  Conservative Christians talk a lot about "being forgiven" but they don't talk a lot about renunciation.  Progressive Christians talk a lot about "justice" but they don't talk a lot about renunciation. The Latin root of the word renunciation means "to protest against".  The contemporary definition of renunciation means "the formal rejection of something".  Synonyms of renunciation are:  Abstention from, refraining from, going without, giving up, eschewal of, repudiat...

We're fast approaching Holy Week -- that culmination of Lent.  There's a lot of talk in Lent about repenting . In Matthew's Greek the word is  metanoeite  (3.2).   The traditional translation is repent .  The GNB paraphrases:  "Turn away from your sins".  Eugene Peterson's translation in  The Message  cuts to the chase:  "Change your life" (today we might say, "Get a life!"). But today I took a step back.  I entered into a conversation with a friend of mine about racism.  I was claiming that we Americans have a 250 year sin which demands confessing.  He said we can't and shouldn't repent of past sin.  That was then.  This is now.  But I think he's wrong.  Racism is  a sin.  It's my sin.  The Greek means, literally, "change your mind" -- and that's where I want to start, with where we are, with the fact that, actually, not only are we not very good at changing our minds, but indeed ch...

I spent a lot of time here talking about the New Testament notion of "the principalities and powers".  Even this week, every post thus far has referenced them.  So perhaps a little primer is in order.  The "powers and principalities" play a distinctive role in how I articulate sin  and death .  They are mentioned throughout the NT and contribute to a theology that places death  (not sin) as the ultimate foe.  Take a few minutes to read these texts:  Romans 8.38-39; Colossians 1.16; Romans 13.3; 1 Corinthians 15.24; Ephesians 6.12.  At the heart of the powers and principalities in the NT is a theology of the Fall .  Bonhoeffer is right (in his lectures on Genesis 1-3, Creation and Fall ) to insist that our  conceptions of the Fall shape our vision of Christian ethics.  For Bonhoeffer -- and for me -- the Fall isn't just about human sinfulness, people doing bad things.  The Fall points to the moral disorder of Creation ...

Gustaf Aulen's  Christus Victor , first published in 1931, has influenced the way generations of students think about Christ's death.  According to Aulen's typology, there are three main types of atonement theory:  (1) the "classical" ransom theory, according to which God used Jesus as bait to rescue humanity from subjugation to the devil; (2) the "objective" satisfaction theory, according to which Jesus' death satisfies the demands of God's honour or justice; and (3) the "subjective" moral influence theory, according to which Jesus' obedient death has an exemplary moral power that can be imitated by others.  I do not believe Aulen's typology is a reliable guide to the Christian tradition.  Some comments on each of his three types:  (1) His first category -- intended to represent patristic thought -- is a real muddle.  The importance it gives to the role of the devil is very misleading.  The image of Jesus as bait on a hook has ...

I make a lot out of  Jesus' radical welcome and embrace of "tax collectors and sinners".  So inevitably someone will  try to throw some cold water by bringing up John 8.1-11.  This is the famous story of the woman caught in the act of adultery.  After challenging the men accusing the woman -- "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her" -- causing them to drop their stones and walk off, Jesus turns to the woman: "Woman, where are they?  Has no one condemned you?" "No one, sir," she said. "Then neither do I condemn you ..." So far, so good. Jesus doesn't condemn the women like the men have.  But that's not Jesus's final word.  His parting word is this: "Go and sin no more." The way John 8.1-11 rhetorically functions in many conversations is as evidence that Jesus had moral standards.  Jesus's embrace wasn't unconditional, it had strings attached.  That is, Jesus' welco...

I encounter this mentality quite a bit; enough so, that I've come to counter it each time I see it.  In our own American cultural context, it's largely made along political polarizational lines:  There's "us" and there's "them".  What's more, what's acceltable for one is then condemned for the other.  This mentality is what we call ethnocentrism.  And it's a sin.  Just as sure as there's any sin.  One need only take Paul's argument from Romans 1-3 seriously:  "There is no one righteous, not one ... no matter who you are".  The trouble, of course, is the mentality that we can somehow section off a few from the rest.  Now, I'm as bothered as most by the current American governments overreach and overspending.  That said, I find the current political crises that assume a polarization to be equally bad.  "They" aren't the problem.  "We" are.  As you learn in Sociology 101, ethnocentrism is  an att...

I have a long-standing debate with friends.  I ask, "Can you sin if you're on a desert island, alone?"  They say yes; I say no.  I think sin is a social notion.  No people, no sin.  And luminaries such as Spinoza back me up on this.  Spinoza said:  "In the state of nature no sin can be conceived".  I agree.  What's more, I think Jesus' very incarnation backs this up.  Sin isn't natural.  It's learned.  What's more, it's learned in groups.  Think Adam and Eve's sin in isolation from one another and the rest of creation.  If that worked, the judgments in the latter part of Genesis 3 wouldn't work.   Sin isn't natural.  So the line that people often use -- "I'm only human" -- is a serious misstep.   Being human  isn't being naturally sinful.  If it were, God's embracing it wouldn't make much sense.  Now, of course, this is all in direct disagreement of my friends.  They tend to view sin...

One of the most astonishing things about Jesus is his determination to stand on the side of losers.  His associations with folks who still smell of the stench and disgust of sin actually serves to make folks question who he is in the Gospels.  Because of associations with women, the rich, the plagued, the sick, the poor, Gentiles, outcasts -- in short, the losers -- religious authorities questioned his kindness and forgiveness.  Folks who were "in the know" about religious matters used those associations to depict Jesus' work as tainted, even demonic.  That's because, in the logic of Torah, sin is disgusting.  Just look at the logic of Atonement in Leviticus 16.   Specifically, the Day of Atonement ritual revolves around the notions of  boundary-monitoring  and  expulsion , the very psychological dynamics guiding the disgust response.  Disgust monitors the boundary of the body -- inside versus outside -- and pushes away or expels (e.g., ...