Living In Sin

"A thousand years is but a day..." so a couple of months? Well, here's another installment, and, as intended, the topic is sin. There is so much to unpack from just three letters. Part of the delay in posting is the question: where to begin? Not finding a natural place that doesn't require more background, I'll begin where I may, knowing there will be opportunity to post more later. This post introduces two directions from which to look at sin. They could be mutually exclusive, but they do not have to be. And note, that while sin has it's place as THE human problem, Marcus Borg draws attention in Speaking Christian to other pressing human problems addressed in the Bible that he would not call sin.

Christian tradition has looked at sin from a couple of directions (at least). From either of these directions, sin is alienation from God. For those, unaccustomed to God-talk, I'll frame sin this way, using language I have introduced elsewhere in the blog: Sin is our alienation (or separation) from that to which we ought to be loyal, the gap, if you will, between what we are loyal to and what we ought to be loyal to. But primarily, this post introduces two directions from which to look at sin.

Through many conversations, I gather that the most common way to think of sin is as a discrete wrongdoing - a bad deed, perhaps, like a breach of the Ten Commandments, or an action that can be categorized in the Seven Deadly Sins. This was certainly the only way I had thought about sin and sins before I became more familiar with Christian thought. We are alienated from God by each and all of our actions that are less than loving toward our neighbors. Sin is the gap in our actions between the "is" and the "ought".

There are benefits to this way of thinking. We are not infrequently alienated from our neighbors because of things we do. We understand in those cases that we ought to make amends and hopefully be forgiven by those neighbors in order to rebuild the breached relationship. And it is easy to imagine that it could be so with God. In addition, dealing with individual acts and omissions breaks the problem down into manageable chunks. We can feel that we are working to improve ourselves, and, for most of us, we could use a little improving. (This view can also be enlarged from the individual to the corporate level, although the chunks then become more difficult to manage). This is a strain of Christian tradition that accentuates righteousness as obeying commandments. It can be biblically inferred. Our sinful actions cause our alienation from God. Work on the actions brings us closer to God, closing the behavioral gap between the "is" and the "ought".

We can come at the question of sinful acts from the other direction. In this case, our alienation from God causes our sinful actions. This too has biblical support. The fundamental problem is not that we do bad things (although that is a problem for those who have to endure them), but that we are not loyal to God in the first place. In fact, our actions are quite appropriate in reflecting our loyalties to the idols of status, tribe, security, or whatever. Rather than piecemeal reform of actions, we need to bring God into the center of our lives instead of the idols, and allow our behavior to flow accordingly. Sin is the loyalty gap between the "is" and the "ought".

This is the call to repentance. The Greek for repentance, metanoia, means something like "thinking beyond ourselves", more righteous thinking, perhaps, and the Hebrew teshuvah means "to turn", a turning toward God. Thinking beyond and turning may include regret for actions or inactions, and may include making amends to those we have hurt, but primarily repentance is about a new, deeper relationship with God. We are closing the gap between that to which we are loyal and that to which we ought to be loyal.

The Roman Catholic sacrament of confession looks at first sight to be about asking forgiveness for sins as actions. Protestants tend to pray for forgiveness in a similar way. But it seems to me that the sacrament (as outward sign of inward, invisible grace) is in the forgiveness part. The power of the sacrament or the prayer lies in our realization of being forgiven and accepted. We may learn to love more deeply when we feel how deeply we are loved.

Enough for now, and I know that I am barely scratching the surface. When I first encountered the possibility that alienation from God causes sin, rather than sin causing alienation, I had much to reflect on before I moved on. And even now, in the writing, this idea sheds new light on old questions for me. May it be so for you.

Sick Souls and Healthy Minds

Conversations outside the blog have led me to back up a little. 

You may have been reading previous posts, and finding it difficult to follow my pessimistic assessment of human nature. This may not be the fault of my argument or of your ability to follow it, but a result of our respective religious temperaments. So, before I go further in describing Sin, it might not be amiss to reflect on the work of philosopher and psychologist William James (sitting at left above). If you are interested, his book The Varieties of Religious Experience is well worth reading, but I will give here brief descriptions of the religous temperaments he termed "healthy-minded" and "sick-souled"

William James well understood that people express religion in various ways, and that this had to do with experience and temperament. He noted that some speakers seem certain of the goodness of life, exuding confidence in human abilities to do the right and abstain from wrongdoing, who saw every setback in moral character as temporary and, in principle, correctible by piecemeal adjustments to our behavior and relationship with the world. He would use the term "healthy-minded" to describe their outlook. They were generally to be found in the liberal denominations of his day (and I would hazard in our own), and James thought that the Roman Catholic Church was generally amenable to the healthy-minded. For a healthy-minded preacher, think Ralph Waldo Emerson. Those sharing this temperament, we would call optimistic, and they certainly appear to live happier lives than the other grouping that James observed.

These he termed "sick-souled". Their assessment of nature and human character was much bleaker, not something to be remedied by piecemeal adjustments, but requiring wholesale conversion, understood to arrive "supernaturally", certainly from beyond the usual plane of human effort. These were often found in Protestantism (although, note the optimism of 19th century Unitarianism and Universalism). For a sick-souled preacher, think Jonathan Edwards. While the sick-souled live less happy lives, James considered they have something serious to offer us with respect to understanding the human condition.

James also understood that people lay on a continuum between extremes of healthy-minded and sick-souled. He held to a pragmatic philosophy, regarding as philosophically true that which was useful for our behavior. He was certainly not averse to searching for the true among alternative or opposing ideas, for which I consider him wise, since the sick-souled and the healthy-minded have much to offer to each other, if only we are willing to listen.

Our religious temperament also impacts on understandings of wrongdoing and evil. To the healthy-minded the problem of evil is the problem of "ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail". To the sick-souled the problem is "Sin in the singular, with a capital S, as of something ineradically ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial, piecemeal operations."

Traditionally, Sin has been understood as alienation to God. In an earlier post (Between Gods and Idols), I suggested a definition of God as Ordering Principle, along the lines of "that to which our thoughts and actions ought to be loyal". This seems to me a useful way of encouraging conversation among the widest range of belief. Whether gods are imagined walking on Olympus or in Eden, whether understood as disembodied intelligence or set of ideals, whether the "believer" calls themselves Christian, theist, agnostic or atheist, as long as they value some attitudes and actions over others, they will find a place in the conversation.

The problem of Sin becomes the question of what prevents our thoughts and actions being in the service of or directed toward this Ordering Principle, which I call God, and the question of how this alienation from this Ordering Principle might be removed. We are also interested in describing the consequences of Sin, and the consequences of its removal. Those of us who are Christian will want an account of this in traditional and biblical language, while those coming from other traditions or none may want to reflect on how they describe these terms.

Which brings me back to comments. Be assured, I'd be interested in your impressions to this developing theology, and so might other readers. Theology is a conversation. Please submit comments.