The Sin Paper
Dec. 1st, 2003 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosI've finished my paper on Sin, and despite a couple of awkward spots, I'm generally pleased with it. This was one of those times that the act of writing uncovered some ideas I hadn't yet brought to consciousness.
The paper is being submitted for my "Christian Anthropology" class, which is a required course of my M.Div. program. It is based on the ideas of systematic theologian Paul Tillich, with a liberal dose of personal experience and reflection added in. (One of the fascinating aspects of seminary is that it acknowledges that everything we study has a personal implication, and so we are encouraged to include personal reflection as part of our course work.)
So for those who are interested, the paper is hidden behind the cut tag below.
I grew up sharing what I believe is a common understanding of sin: that a sin is a specific act which violates God’s law. Good Christians, like good citizens, are “good” because they obey the law. This kind of legalistic understanding of sin makes identifying “us” and “them” easy, a game of Good Guys/Bad Guys. It also simplifies one’s own Christian life: follow the rules, pray to be forgiven for the mistakes you make, and all will be well. Growing up as a self-identified Good Christian Girl, following the rules was very important to me. Growing up as a non-denominational liberal Protestant in a comfortable, middle-class home, it was also relatively easy. The rules were clear; I followed them, and I was secure in the knowledge of my own virtue.
Tillich wants us to have a deeper and more pervasive understanding of sin, one in which the issue is not whether a person follows the rules, but what he or she places at the center of life. In Tillich’s theology, a person who looks like a “model Christian” by virtue of church and charitable activities may well be the most deeply estranged from God, and therefore the most sinful of all. “Sin,” he writes, “is a matter of our relation to God, and not to ecclesiastical, moral or social authorities,” and “It is not the disobedience to a law which makes an act sinful but the fact that it is an expression of man’s estrangement from God, from men, from himself.”
Tragically, estrangement is an inevitable part of human existence. It is part of our destiny. Estrangement from God follows immediately upon actualization of the freedom that is a fundamental characteristic of Tillich’s definition of the human.
The individual act of existential estrangement is not the isolated act of an isolated individual; it is an act of freedom which is embedded, nevertheless, in the universal destiny of existence. In every individual act the estranged or fallen character of being actualizes itself. . . . Existence is rooted in both ethical freedom and in tragic destiny. If the one or the other side is denied, the human situation becomes incomprehensible. Their unity is the great problem of the doctrine of man.
To be human, to actualize our freedom, is to be estranged from God – which, as Tillich himself acknowledges, is a “problem.”
The first mark of human estrangement is “unbelief.” This is not “disbelief,” an intellectual denial of the existence of God, but a way of living which places something besides God at the center of life. “Unbelief is the separation of man’s will from the will of God.” This condition is implicit in estrangement. When God is no longer at the center of human life, something else must be elevated to fill that vacuum. Most commonly, what moves to the center is self, an expression of hubris: “the self-elevation of man into the sphere of the divine.”
Another way of describing what happens when the self replaces God as the primary reference point of life is incurvatus se. Instead of human love and energy flowing “upward” or toward God, it flows backward, toward the self, inverting the proper order of things. Tragically, ironically, even paradoxically, our loves can become the path by which our estrangement from God is deepened when God is not the first and highest of our loves. Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) expressed this vividly in an example in which he corresponds what he identifies as “the three universal loves: love of heaven, love of the world, and love of self” to the head, abdomen and feet of the body.
Correctly subordinated, these three loves perfect us; but wrongly subordinated, they pervert and invert us. . . . When love of heaven constitutes the head, love of the world the chest and abdomen, and love of self the feet and their soles, we are in a perfect state according to creation, because the two lower loves serve the highest. . . When love of heaven constitutes the head, it flows out into our love of the world. . .by which means of which it can perform uses.
But we come into an entirely different state when love of the world. . . forms the head as the ruling love. In this state we prefer the world to heaven: we may indeed worship God, but from merely natural love which finds merit in all worship; we may do good for the neighbor, but do it for the sake of recompense.
When the loves are fully inverted, with love of self ruling from the head instead of keeping its proper place at our feet, “We would then appear to angels like one lying bent over, with our head to the ground and our back toward heaven. When worshipping, we would appear to be frolicking on our hands and feet like a panther’s cub.” While I can’t assert that Swedenborg intended this, I find it interesting, in light of the points I made in my first paper about the loss of human standing through moral degradation, that this example ends with the human person transformed (in the eyes of the spirit world) into an animal because inverted/perverted loves.
When love of something other than God assumes the central position in our life, claiming the worship of our time and energy (even if we continue to pay lip service to God), we fall into the third of Tillich’s marks of estrangement, concupiscence, or unbridled desire. This desire is not necessarily sexual, and does not always express itself outwardly in actions that seem to be “sinful”. Study, charitable acts, public service, even religious devotions can all have the outward appearance of goodness – and even be of benefit to others – but when they are motivated by love of self rather than love of God, they intensify or deepen estrangement, and thus must be considered sinful.
Ultimately, the person who seeks for meaning and reassurance in any source except God experiences breakdown of the structures of being. Our search for meaning, and for the courage to withstand the ontological anxiety which is also part of our human destiny, must be centered on the transcendent. Our hubris may delude us thinking we are our own appropriate centers, but our finitude is insufficient for the role we try to play. The answer to ontological anxiety is, in every case, God. And it is only by and through God’s grace that we are able to keep Him at the center of our lives, and our other loves subordinated to our love for God.
With the powerful forces of our tragic destiny of estrangement on the one hand and God’s grace on the other, it would be easy at this point to forget the issue of human freedom which is at the root of the matter. But the freedom which precipitates our estrangement also makes us responsible for our choices. Sin, Tillich informs us, is both a fact (estrangement) and an act.
It is not enough to be good, law-abiding citizens. Our condition of unbelief and hubris demands that we be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about where we are centered, where our energies are flowing, and how our loves are ordered. Grace will help us with this self-examination, but we must choose to be open to the insights of grace – something which is not always comfortable where sin is concerned.
The consequences of estrangement reach beyond the individual level. Because all humans experience estrangement from God, it is inevitable that human cultures and institutions reflect our condition. It is easy to step back and say, “It’s the system’s fault,” and disclaim personal responsibility for the injustices and evils – but we are all implicated in their crimes. We are all participants in our cultures and institutions, whether we support them actively, or whether we sit back and passively allow them to continue. Anna Quindlen speaks eloquently on this point in her column in the most recent issue of Newsweek magazine. After pointing out that “one in four American workers made less than $8.70 an hour, an income equal to the government’s poverty level for a family of four,” she goes on to indict not our government officials or the CEO’s of big business, but those of us who coast along wearing blinders, willing to be content with the status quo as long as our own households feel secure.
A living wage, affordable healthcare and housing, the bedrock understanding that it’s morally wrong to prosper through the casual exploitation of those who make your prosperity possible. It’s a tall order, I suppose. The lucky thing for many Americans is that they don’t have to see or think about it. The office hallways get mopped somehow, the shelves get stocked at the stores.
The sheer size of the problem of sin in our cultural institutions is enough to reduce most of us to helpless apathy. “What can one person do?” we ask. This is a question born of estrangement. When we put ourselves at the center of our own lives, not only does it become harder to see and have compassion for those who suffer, our finite nature recoils from the prospect of having to make an appropriate response out of our solitary resources. And it is true: alone, there is not much we can do.
But the fact is, we are not alone. Or we don’t have to be. God is ever-present, ready to companion us, and to act in and through us. Even when we seem to be acting alone, we can be acting in concert with God. Then “one person” can accomplish a great deal.
Beyond that, the action of grace in overcoming our estrangement from God also has the effect of overcoming our estrangement with fellow human beings. When that happens, it becomes harder to walk past someone who is suffering, because we participate in their suffering, as Christ does – and we become empowered to act with love and creativity to respond to their need. It also becomes easier to connect with others to take action, to refuse to accept the myth that we are helpless in the face of large-scale suffering and injustice.
To reduce the problem of sin to its personal consequences is to miss the point. We must take personal responsibility for our relationship with God and for our actions. But when we concentrate only on personal sin we demonstrate the degree to which we are self-centered rather than God-centered. If we love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves, by the time we get around to contemplating on our personal salvation we will find, by God’s grace, that we have already been attending to it.
Works Cited
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957)
Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity
Robert H. Kirven, A Concise Overview of Swedenborg’s Theology (J. Appleseed & Company: 2003)
Anna Quindlen, “A New Kind of Poverty,” Newsweek, December 1, 2003
(The original copy of the paper is fully footnoted, but they didn't translate in the cut-and-paste from Word to LJ, and I didn't think it was important enough to reproduce every page reference here. If someone does want more specific citations, let me know.)
The paper is being submitted for my "Christian Anthropology" class, which is a required course of my M.Div. program. It is based on the ideas of systematic theologian Paul Tillich, with a liberal dose of personal experience and reflection added in. (One of the fascinating aspects of seminary is that it acknowledges that everything we study has a personal implication, and so we are encouraged to include personal reflection as part of our course work.)
So for those who are interested, the paper is hidden behind the cut tag below.
I grew up sharing what I believe is a common understanding of sin: that a sin is a specific act which violates God’s law. Good Christians, like good citizens, are “good” because they obey the law. This kind of legalistic understanding of sin makes identifying “us” and “them” easy, a game of Good Guys/Bad Guys. It also simplifies one’s own Christian life: follow the rules, pray to be forgiven for the mistakes you make, and all will be well. Growing up as a self-identified Good Christian Girl, following the rules was very important to me. Growing up as a non-denominational liberal Protestant in a comfortable, middle-class home, it was also relatively easy. The rules were clear; I followed them, and I was secure in the knowledge of my own virtue.
Tillich wants us to have a deeper and more pervasive understanding of sin, one in which the issue is not whether a person follows the rules, but what he or she places at the center of life. In Tillich’s theology, a person who looks like a “model Christian” by virtue of church and charitable activities may well be the most deeply estranged from God, and therefore the most sinful of all. “Sin,” he writes, “is a matter of our relation to God, and not to ecclesiastical, moral or social authorities,” and “It is not the disobedience to a law which makes an act sinful but the fact that it is an expression of man’s estrangement from God, from men, from himself.”
Tragically, estrangement is an inevitable part of human existence. It is part of our destiny. Estrangement from God follows immediately upon actualization of the freedom that is a fundamental characteristic of Tillich’s definition of the human.
The individual act of existential estrangement is not the isolated act of an isolated individual; it is an act of freedom which is embedded, nevertheless, in the universal destiny of existence. In every individual act the estranged or fallen character of being actualizes itself. . . . Existence is rooted in both ethical freedom and in tragic destiny. If the one or the other side is denied, the human situation becomes incomprehensible. Their unity is the great problem of the doctrine of man.
To be human, to actualize our freedom, is to be estranged from God – which, as Tillich himself acknowledges, is a “problem.”
The first mark of human estrangement is “unbelief.” This is not “disbelief,” an intellectual denial of the existence of God, but a way of living which places something besides God at the center of life. “Unbelief is the separation of man’s will from the will of God.” This condition is implicit in estrangement. When God is no longer at the center of human life, something else must be elevated to fill that vacuum. Most commonly, what moves to the center is self, an expression of hubris: “the self-elevation of man into the sphere of the divine.”
Another way of describing what happens when the self replaces God as the primary reference point of life is incurvatus se. Instead of human love and energy flowing “upward” or toward God, it flows backward, toward the self, inverting the proper order of things. Tragically, ironically, even paradoxically, our loves can become the path by which our estrangement from God is deepened when God is not the first and highest of our loves. Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) expressed this vividly in an example in which he corresponds what he identifies as “the three universal loves: love of heaven, love of the world, and love of self” to the head, abdomen and feet of the body.
Correctly subordinated, these three loves perfect us; but wrongly subordinated, they pervert and invert us. . . . When love of heaven constitutes the head, love of the world the chest and abdomen, and love of self the feet and their soles, we are in a perfect state according to creation, because the two lower loves serve the highest. . . When love of heaven constitutes the head, it flows out into our love of the world. . .by which means of which it can perform uses.
But we come into an entirely different state when love of the world. . . forms the head as the ruling love. In this state we prefer the world to heaven: we may indeed worship God, but from merely natural love which finds merit in all worship; we may do good for the neighbor, but do it for the sake of recompense.
When the loves are fully inverted, with love of self ruling from the head instead of keeping its proper place at our feet, “We would then appear to angels like one lying bent over, with our head to the ground and our back toward heaven. When worshipping, we would appear to be frolicking on our hands and feet like a panther’s cub.” While I can’t assert that Swedenborg intended this, I find it interesting, in light of the points I made in my first paper about the loss of human standing through moral degradation, that this example ends with the human person transformed (in the eyes of the spirit world) into an animal because inverted/perverted loves.
When love of something other than God assumes the central position in our life, claiming the worship of our time and energy (even if we continue to pay lip service to God), we fall into the third of Tillich’s marks of estrangement, concupiscence, or unbridled desire. This desire is not necessarily sexual, and does not always express itself outwardly in actions that seem to be “sinful”. Study, charitable acts, public service, even religious devotions can all have the outward appearance of goodness – and even be of benefit to others – but when they are motivated by love of self rather than love of God, they intensify or deepen estrangement, and thus must be considered sinful.
Ultimately, the person who seeks for meaning and reassurance in any source except God experiences breakdown of the structures of being. Our search for meaning, and for the courage to withstand the ontological anxiety which is also part of our human destiny, must be centered on the transcendent. Our hubris may delude us thinking we are our own appropriate centers, but our finitude is insufficient for the role we try to play. The answer to ontological anxiety is, in every case, God. And it is only by and through God’s grace that we are able to keep Him at the center of our lives, and our other loves subordinated to our love for God.
With the powerful forces of our tragic destiny of estrangement on the one hand and God’s grace on the other, it would be easy at this point to forget the issue of human freedom which is at the root of the matter. But the freedom which precipitates our estrangement also makes us responsible for our choices. Sin, Tillich informs us, is both a fact (estrangement) and an act.
It is not enough to be good, law-abiding citizens. Our condition of unbelief and hubris demands that we be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about where we are centered, where our energies are flowing, and how our loves are ordered. Grace will help us with this self-examination, but we must choose to be open to the insights of grace – something which is not always comfortable where sin is concerned.
The consequences of estrangement reach beyond the individual level. Because all humans experience estrangement from God, it is inevitable that human cultures and institutions reflect our condition. It is easy to step back and say, “It’s the system’s fault,” and disclaim personal responsibility for the injustices and evils – but we are all implicated in their crimes. We are all participants in our cultures and institutions, whether we support them actively, or whether we sit back and passively allow them to continue. Anna Quindlen speaks eloquently on this point in her column in the most recent issue of Newsweek magazine. After pointing out that “one in four American workers made less than $8.70 an hour, an income equal to the government’s poverty level for a family of four,” she goes on to indict not our government officials or the CEO’s of big business, but those of us who coast along wearing blinders, willing to be content with the status quo as long as our own households feel secure.
A living wage, affordable healthcare and housing, the bedrock understanding that it’s morally wrong to prosper through the casual exploitation of those who make your prosperity possible. It’s a tall order, I suppose. The lucky thing for many Americans is that they don’t have to see or think about it. The office hallways get mopped somehow, the shelves get stocked at the stores.
The sheer size of the problem of sin in our cultural institutions is enough to reduce most of us to helpless apathy. “What can one person do?” we ask. This is a question born of estrangement. When we put ourselves at the center of our own lives, not only does it become harder to see and have compassion for those who suffer, our finite nature recoils from the prospect of having to make an appropriate response out of our solitary resources. And it is true: alone, there is not much we can do.
But the fact is, we are not alone. Or we don’t have to be. God is ever-present, ready to companion us, and to act in and through us. Even when we seem to be acting alone, we can be acting in concert with God. Then “one person” can accomplish a great deal.
Beyond that, the action of grace in overcoming our estrangement from God also has the effect of overcoming our estrangement with fellow human beings. When that happens, it becomes harder to walk past someone who is suffering, because we participate in their suffering, as Christ does – and we become empowered to act with love and creativity to respond to their need. It also becomes easier to connect with others to take action, to refuse to accept the myth that we are helpless in the face of large-scale suffering and injustice.
To reduce the problem of sin to its personal consequences is to miss the point. We must take personal responsibility for our relationship with God and for our actions. But when we concentrate only on personal sin we demonstrate the degree to which we are self-centered rather than God-centered. If we love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves, by the time we get around to contemplating on our personal salvation we will find, by God’s grace, that we have already been attending to it.
Works Cited
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957)
Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity
Robert H. Kirven, A Concise Overview of Swedenborg’s Theology (J. Appleseed & Company: 2003)
Anna Quindlen, “A New Kind of Poverty,” Newsweek, December 1, 2003
(The original copy of the paper is fully footnoted, but they didn't translate in the cut-and-paste from Word to LJ, and I didn't think it was important enough to reproduce every page reference here. If someone does want more specific citations, let me know.)
