At my church home group we tried to think through what the Bible teaches about our sinfulness. The evangelical circles in which I came to faith, we focused a lot on how bad (sinful) we are by nature. But I thought about coming at the whole sin thing from another angle, one that emphasizes the goodness of our creation—that all humans bear the “likeness” or “image” of God. This is something I came up with:
As we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge our createdness, we reveal the root of our sin. This refusal is grounded in our fear of death and pain, fear of uncontrollability and vulnerability—our fear that someone else is in control of our lives. But this root is such a mystery because it grows in the waters of God’s gracious gift—the gift of being created in God’s own image. Our problem is our glory. We easily turn from the dependency that comes with gratefully receiving the gift of our glorious identity as created in God’s image, to the independence of attempting our self-glorification, assuming the role of God so we don’t need God anymore—a practical atheism of sorts. I think this is where Augustine was pointing when he named pride as the root of all sin. That pride is the original sin, in a sense. This pride is simply the exaggeration of a human tendency, our desire to exceed the boundaries of being merely “like God” and set ourselves up as our own gods, the ground of our own being. In pride, we deny our contingent existence.
How does that sound?
5 responses so far ↓
1 Drew // Jul 10, 2005 at 11:04 am
Yes, I agree. My view of “original sin” has shifted greatly in the past decade or so. I think I fall closer to a conception that actually may be more Jewish than Christian: that God created us in God’s image, and like the rest of the creation, saw that we were “good”; that sin and a sinful nature are not necessarily foces unto themselves (although it is often helpful to use this metaphor), but actions and lifestyles made in opposition to God and God’s will; that, therefore, we are not born with “original sin” per se (i.e., something ingrained into who we are), but our “original sin” might be more of a collective reality, rather than an individual one, and as individuals drowning in a world of sin, we have all succumbed to it and interwoven the “sinful nature” into who we each are (cf. Romans 3).
I haven’t done any study on my own of the theology of this issue, and I am sure Augustine or some other great luminary has many helpful things to say on this point. This is just how my thinking has developed over the past years.
I wanted to raise a question, especially in light of your somewhat recent post, “Against Theological Triumphalism,” regarding the idea of original sin: Do you think focusing on original sin, rather than “coming at the whole sin thing from another angle,” has harmed us in our ability to live out the compassion of Christ for others, to have the love of God for other people? It seems to me that starting with the idea that we are all innately sinful, rather than starting with the idea that we are all inherently depictions (in some way) of who God is, skews our view of our fellow images. And yet, many seem to do this.
2 Mark Lawrence // Jul 10, 2005 at 2:43 pm
Do you think focusing on original sin[...] has harmed us in our ability to live out the compassion of Christ for others
The law is there as a tutor, right? And yet, time and time again we get bound up in the law (the benchmark—one way of focusing on sinfulness).
The result: the fear of cheapening grace, the insidious inclination to want to do something about it, even though our righteousness is as filthy rags. Millenia after Jesus and Paul delivered the message that our access to God has been provided through His own love and mercy towards us and that in our brokeness, we are healed our faith has become known for “penances” and the toting up of brownie points to get into heaven—at least, in popular culture it is. In holiness tradions, the focus is often on the list of don’ts rather than the dos.
I could go on, but won’t as I should be working.
3 isaac // Jul 10, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Mark, thanks for the post and welcome to the blip. I think you are totally right about God’s grace reaches beyond anything we can or cannot do. It seems like it is so easy to forget how radical God’s grace is. But everytime I get swept away by Paul’s “law-free” gospel of grace, I stummble on that passage from Philippians 2:12-13: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” Somehow Paul is able to affirm the radical overflow of God’s grace that escapes all boundaries of the will, AND he commends us to “work out our salvation.” That is a tough passage. I am not sure what sense it makes in terms of grace and the ethics involved in the Christian life.
Drew, you made me think of something when you talked about the “starting point” that determines the “angle” we come at the whole sin thing. Maybe we are missing something more fundamental with starting from the “beginning.” This is what I mean: both of us want to destabilize the “innately sinful” angle by offering an essential goodness to humanity. Both viewpoints attempt to reason towards an ontological formulation of human nature (either sinful or good) from the past, from the beginning. Well, this may miss the eschatological nature of Christianity—that the future has broken into the present in Jesus Christ and is drawing us toward the fulfillment of our nature, our consumation. So, the Christian task, then, is for us to learn how to see things from the eschatological perspective where “Christ is all and is in all” (Col. 3:11). Is that too esoteric?
4 jared // Jul 12, 2005 at 2:19 pm
Hey Isaac, I appreciate your thoughts here. The more I have explored my own spirituality I have discovered a battle between wanting God at the center of my humanity and myself at the center of my humanity. So I use things like spiritual disciplines to place God back in the center. Disciplines themselves describe the process of learning to resist my self and embrace God. Something interesting however, is a conversation I had with a friend who was raised in a community that embraced spirituality differently. They were trained to embrace the self. They learned that God lives inside all of us and at the core; the true “self” is that piece of us that is the Divine’s image. So as I began to describe my idea of spirituality, there was a disconnect between us. It is interesting how the worldviews that we are raised with as children really do heavily impact our visions of God, Humanity, Sin, and everything else. In the end I discovered that we really weren’t that far off from one another in visualizing spirituality and sin, but it required peaceful dialogue to get us there. In one view, true holiness is realize in the denying of the self and the embracing of God, in the other view holiness comes through learning to embrace the divine in the “self”. I thought that was interesting.
5 Drew // Jul 13, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Isaac, I agree that the eschatological nature of the Christian existence is essential, but are we not only who we will be, but also who we have been? Isn’t the eschaton really a restoration of what we have lost, what we have corrupted?
Isn’t the Christian’s conception of Christ not only that of one who ushers in a new era, but also (and in my thinking, even more so) one who has always been? the one by whose agency all things were created, and created to be “good”? Why can’t we start at the beginning? It’s usually a good place to start…
In terms of humanity’s essential goodness, I really don’t think we are thinking radical thoughts here, at least in terms of what we read in the Bible. I think the idea of people being “good” in some way has become strange to us, because we have forgotten that that is how God made us. Why would he make us any other way? What I see happening is that, even though we were made good, we have all sullied that good nature, twisted it. And then we look at ourselves, and it’s just as if we never were good in the first place. I think in practical terms, the two ideas and/or emphases (original sin and corrupted goodness) come to describe the same present plight of the human condition. However, I think that acknowledgement of the goodness that God intended and still does intend for us casts things in a different light, at least for me.
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