Beneficence: The Radical Business of Original Sin

August 05, 2004

The Radical Business of Original Sin

I'm picking up the thread from the comments to the previous post, where Gerry has made some provocative observations. He writes:

There is no "original sin" in any Bible I know of, just a story about a fall from grace. If man's original state is not in grace, then just where did we fall from?

Yes, the Fall was certainly from a state of original grace, and the term "original sin" was Augustine's neologism. But Paul himself says that "In Adam all die" (1 Cor 15:22) The point being that we are all marked by sin and that we are unable to work our way back to the Garden.

I like J. I. Packer's note on this business:

It may be fairly claimed that the Fall narrative gives the only convincing explanation of the perversity of human nature that the world has ever seen. Pascal said that the doctrine of original sin seems an offense to reason, but once accepted it makes total sense of the entire human condition.

We can arrive back in the state of grace only through Grace itself, and interestingly we return not to a garden but to a city. So divine history does entail the working out of how we learn to live well with one another, and in the Christian tradition, Christ is the great magister vitae.

However, the dismissal of all earthly authority, as Gerry seems to endorse, is not possible in the Christian tradition, since the church is itself the Body of Christ. The richness of the Christian faith leaves us here not only with the Spirit of Life to work in and through us, but also through the mystery of the union of Christ and the Church enjoins us to attend to the needs of the body as well. And to unite ourselves in community under One Head. Christians do not agree on the earthly form this One Head takes (pope, presbytery, metropolitan, etc), but we are enjoined to submit ourselves to church authority as well as to the authority of the Holy Spirit. I just bought Bonhoeffer's Life in Community. Will be intersting to see what light it sheds on these matters.

But back to the bottom line: I think the Christian tradition offers us a rich, living, and sufficient religious paradigm. And yet there is work for us to do. I deeply appreciate the following observation of Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy:

What right and left have in common is that neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament, with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life. What is taught as the essential message about Jesus has no natural connection to entering a life of discipleship to him.

Willard then goes on to expose the shorcomings of both the right's "atonement as the whole story" gospel and the left's "religion as social ethics" gospel and to diagnose the situation thus:

And so we have the result noted: the resources of God's kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life.

The remainder of the book presents a quite fresh and radical re-reading of the Sermon on the Mount. I highly recommend it.

August 05, 2004 in Faith Reflections | Permalink

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