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The Sin Paper
I'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.)
no subject
no subject
I look forward to any comments you have on the paper.
no subject
Still the simplest and best answer about what to do :)
How things mysteriously overlap - I'm reading "City of God" (its a novel, by E.L. Doctorow) which seems to be taking a similar view of sin (original sin in this case)...he talks about it by way of Wittgenstein...but I wouldn't be surprised if he's read Tillich too. And My priest was talking about Tillich today too.
no subject
most of the theology i encounter in my academic work -- not all of it by theologians, also by theorists writing in the western tradition who are interested in the sacred -- is obsessed with transcendence. i find myself asking the question over and over again, why do we need to be so focused on transcendence? how would this theory change if we thought of the sacred as mainly being immanent? what problems would that solve, and what new problems would that create?
for myself, i don't feel like it's possible to get at god without mediation. i put service to being, and especially to humanity, at the center of my life, and don't see that as elevating that which is not god above god. true, only GOD is GOD, utterly transcendent, and not anything that we can see or touch or even conceptualize, but i've never been able to understand how we can possibly do service to or even meaningfully relate to transcendence. we have to try to serve god through the material world that we live in. in my life, that generally means i make service to humanity my ultimate concern, because we are the most conscious embodiments of divine being that we are aware of.
really, not making the medium of your service to the divine into an idol is purely a matter of attitude, i think. even if i was the only person left on earth, there would still be meaningful ways that i could serve the divine. that not being the case, though, the human race (and more locally, my loved ones) are my areas of ultimate concern.
anyway. that is my very personal response. it's not meant so much as a criticism of your paper as a continuing articulation of the issues i have with the western emphasis on transcendence. i'm just not satisfied with the ways that theologians insist on a radically transcendent god and also believe that social justice is our most important task. (the gap is usually filled with a belief in immutable divine law, but i reject that idea on separate grounds.) in my thinking, there's a breakdown in the middle there that can only be filled by immanence, and it's only recently that theologians -- most of them marginalized -- have begun to try to deal with that.
no subject
i find myself asking the question over and over again, why do we need to be so focused on transcendence? how would this theory change if we thought of the sacred as mainly being immanent? what problems would that solve, and what new problems would that create?
My first response is that I'm not sure what it was about my paper that raised this issue with you.
My perspective is that there needs to be a dynamic balance between transcendence and immanence in our God-talk. I agree with you that a God who is utterly transcendent is impossible to relate with and a God who is utterly immanent stops being God. I consider this to be one of the more important aspects of the life of Christ: bringing the transcendent and immanent together. "He who has seen me has seen the Father." (I'll leave the issue gender and divinity for another post.)
really, not making the medium of your service to the divine into an idol is purely a matter of attitude, i think.
If you and I are understanding each other, I think that you are affirming Tillich's point. It is the inner attitude, the why, the way the energy is flowing, which is the basis for judging an outwardly pious act "pleasing to God" or not. And it's not a judgement one person can or should be making about another.
no subject
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.
i'm remembering now that tillich is pretty big on immanence -- and i'm not really surprised that you are too, it just didn't come out explicitly in this paper. the tillich quote about not putting humanity at the center isn't in context, but my thought when i read it was that i actually do make humankind my ultimate concern, but i don't see that as being inconsistent with making god my ultimate concern because human beings are the primary medium through which i relate to the divine.
it's possible to imagine a hypothetical situation where devotion to humankind would be an idol -- like deciding life is meaningless because you're the last human being left on earth -- but they're so unlikely i don't give them a lot of thought. it seems to me it's perfectly okay to put humankind at the center since humankind is already too big and complicated to be grasped. i guess, being pressed, i'd say service to the earth as a living system is more important than service to humanity, but if we care about our own survival at all we should be serving gaia, so really it ends up being the same anyway.
heh. i hope this is making sense, it's starting to make my head hurt. :>
anyway, my complaint is really about the overemphasis on transcendence in western theology in general, and this looked like a good opportunity to run my mouth off. :>
and a God who is utterly immanent stops being God.
i may have overstated myself a little, since i'm not really entirely clear on that issue yet. it certainly is easy to make the medium of your service to the divine into an idol, and that's not good. but i'm not sure if a god who is utterly immanent stops being god. being is certainly far too vast and complicated for us to grasp in anything but a partial way, but being -- and here i guess i mean "the universe" -- may well be finite. a god who is utterly immanent in a finite universe that is still utterly ineffable to us might still be god in my mind. i have to think about that more.
no subject
As far as I understand things, having God in the center results in greater love and service (or, in Swedenborgian terms, "uses") to humanity.
Tillich would also say (I think) that even an atheist who was motivated by his or her affirmation of "the transcendentals" to acts of justice, truth, compassion, beauty, etc., was acting from an appropriate orientation.
The basic question is this: is a person acting "for humanity" because s/he is motivated by love for others and a dedication to something greater than self, or is this person motivated by self-centered interest in their own salvation, or for the honor it will bring them in the eyes of society? That's the crux. Is the energy flowing outward, in love, or inward, incurvatus se?
This is just me
As I read this I remember the one thing that has stayed with me. God is always with me even when I turn my back on him, or I worship in his glory. He is with me in the good and the bad. This is why he is my God.
“That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”
It is his presence that protects me and guides my life. I may from time to time (ok more often than not) fall from his path, which does not mean that he left my side. He makes my heart know what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes my choices are the ones he wants and sometimes I am selfish for self. I feel in my life that is why I reach out to people. I think that god has a plan for me to help. I think that God has that in his will for me. I feel that God has blessed me with spiritual gifts of discernment and empathy.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
This passage is what I think I have been called to do. I take the road less traveled yet I walk on the dark side of it. I feel that places that I go and the things that I do people can see what I have. It is during this time that I can make my testimony be known and they can make a choice by seeing my life being something that they wish they had.
It is not just his word or prayers or worship that can help us on our path, but a conscious choice to follow him unconditionally is a truth. He guides us to find our weapons to fight sin. It is up to us to remember to use it for his will and not our own.