Sin is not the problem with humanity.
Whew! Nice to get that bit of “heresy” out the way! But of course, sin must be the problem with humanity. That’s what the Bible tells us: sin is the problem, and Jesus is the answer, right?
Wrong.
Think about it this way: if sin is the wrong way to be, then sin’s opposite would be the right way to be, which is holy. So if sin is the problem, and Jesus is the answer, then Jesus came and died to make us holy, right? But while the New Testament speaks of Christ’s death as removing sin, that is not the goal. If it were, the matter would be left there.
But it’s not.
Rather, the goal is plainly stated: as part of inaugurating the kingdom of God—that is, claiming all of existence for God and as God’s—Jesus came to renew right relationship between God and all things. Dealing with sin is part of solving the problem, but it is not the problem. The problem is that all things (foremost among them, perhaps, human beings) are not in right relationship with God.
Or better, that God loves us and longs for us, but our relationship with God is sundered and needs fixing.
If this is so, then God never see us simply as “sinners” in need of grace but as Gregg, John, Sally, and Matt, whom God loves with wild abandon and whom God longs to embrace as God’s own, beautiful and beloved children. God does not so much seek to make us right as to hold us tight—not so much to right our behaviours as to right our hearts (and to write God’s law within our hearts, as Jer 33:31), and then our behaviours will follow.
Now I am not, for all of that, suggesting that the notion of sin is nonsensical, oppressive or outdated. Nor am I implying that the rightness of our thoughts, words, and actions are unimportant—both to ourselves and to God. Perhaps I could say it this way: God’s love (and truth) are focal, but sin matters.
God’s love being focal means that Christianity is not about rules. It means that as a Christian I never get to the point where I am “a hopeless case,” “unforgivable,” or “worthless.”
In short, for me the deep reality of God’s loves and God’s truth means that when people ask why I am a Christian I give them this reason: because I have been convinced by God’s truth and fallen in love with God, who loves and heals me. Because I have felt the deep, deep desire of God for me and, like Augustine says, “the satiation of God’s love is insatiable.”
So what about sin: what is it and why is it important?
To my mind, “sin” is things we do or maintain (acts, thoughts, or dispositions commissive or omissive–conscious, pre-conscious, or unconscious), that thwart our proper relationship with ourselves, our fellows, our world, and ultimately God. Fleshing this out in terms of life’s daily activities is an important task, but it’s beyond the scope of this post.
Instead, I’d like to offer my main reasons for not jettisoning a concrete notion of sin. First, because evil is real. Second, because evil is real. Third—need I go on?
The reality of evil is the reality that people suffer and die. In that sense, insisting on evil’s reality is an insistence that people matter. So against the idea that sin burdens us with unnecessary guilt, maintaining the seriousness of evil and wrongdoing does not straightjacket our freedom but rather deeply affirms our worth. As such, it is the crucial correlate to the biblical claim that God loves us.
The flipside of evil being real (and wrong) is that justice is necessary. And this is one of the central claims of Jesus as Messiah: he came to deal with sin and death—with evil in all its various forms. But the reality is, God’s justice is limited.
What… more heresy…?
I think not. But you’ll have to wait until next post to decide.
I think this is relevant http://gspn.tv/threefreesins/
Santiago!
Great to have your comments here again. Thanks for the link to this podcast with Steve Brown: I listened to it with interest and then read a few reviews of the book on Amazon. So here’s my perspective, bearing in mind that I haven’t actually read the book itself.
This is an important quotation from the podcast, at around minute 17:
“In Romans Paul is so clear about the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. Not only did Jesus take our sin . . . but he gave us all of his righteousness. . . . Which means that sin is not the issue anymore. And when we make it the issue we become blasphemous and deny the gospel that is at the essence of the Christian faith.”
During the podcast Steve Brown made much of the fact that Christians should not be pigeonholing other Christians on the basis of their specific beliefs and thereby disqualifying their perspectives. Agreed. We need dialogue and not dispute. However, we must also recognize that while our specific beliefs open new possibilities for our existence, they likewise naturally foreclose on others.
My point is this: I disagree with the perspective that Steve Brown expresses in the quotation. I do so for two reasons. First, because his view is based on biblical texts whose exegesis has, in the last 40 years, seen a huge change in how we understand the pivotal notion of “God’s righteousness.” Second, because this difference in understanding God’s righteousness both informs and correlates with my own key experiences of God: being known by God more truly than I know myself, and being loved by God more deeply than I love myself (and loving God in return).
You may ask: isn’t this nit-picking though? Doing exactly what Mr. Brown prescribed against? I don’t think so.
Instead, the importance of the exegesis I favour is that it actually makes sense of and with my lived experience in a way that his exegesis doesn’t. In other words, part of what legitimates Christianity as True is that our understandings of God and our experiences of God (and vice versa) reconcile. And further, that they do so with respect to both truth (so these things are indeed accurate to our best readings of the biblical text and of our own lives and experiences) and love (so these things are not just arbitrary truths but are deeply and profoundly ‘for me’ and for my good in a way that I can “taste and see” in my present existence and that I long to embrace because they represent my ‘ownmost’ and ‘bestmost’ possibilities).
In other words, I think that his definition of sin and mine are at odds because I think he still views sin as, basically, “stuff we do wrong against God.” And so his big claim is that from his view of justification (i.e., the “imputation of the righteousness of Christ,” as he puts it) sin is powerless in the sense that it will never deter God’s love for us Christians because we have Christ’s righteousness, imputed to us.
On my definition, sin is anything that takes us out of right relationship with ourselves, others, our world, and particularly God. Sin is not just an issue for non-Christians—it is an issue for everyone, all the time. Neither is sin so much “stuff we do wrong against God.” That perspective makes sin a matter of right and wrong, which are categories associated with truth.
Now truth plays into the matter. For example, I believe it is True that God exists, that this God is at least the God of the Christian Bible (yet the full revelation of God is not in a text but in the living person of Jesus), that God loves us and desires relationship with us, and that we—through our actions, dispositions, etc.—can both kindle and thwart that relationship. Truth is important, but it is not what is chiefly at stake, nor what Christians seem so unable to grasp.
Why do I think this?
Because the greatest commandment is not: “Accept the truth of your God and know that truth with all your…” The greatest commandment is to love God with all that we are.
If this is the Christian’s primary orientation then our understanding of—and response to—sin must likewise be conditioned by this dual perspective: love and truth, truth and love.
So how does this change things?
Understanding that God’s love for us is not diminished, and that God will not reject us, no matter what we do is of crucial importance and can indeed be extremely liberating. But understanding about God’s love is not the same thing as being in love with God, and having all one’s orientations informed and directed by one’s love. That is the sense of Jeremiah 31:33, where this is the sign of those within the new covenant: “I will put my law within them, and I will write in on their hearts.” (NRSV)
And now we come back to the importance of how we exegete the passages relating to “God’s righteousness.” I see the matter thus:
It is not that we possess God’s righteousness, but that through the process of being judged by God we are vindicated on account of Jesus actions in fulfilling the covenant. This vindication, within a Hebrew law court setting, amounts to the party ajudged in the right being deemed “righteous.” The key phrase in all of this is “the righteousness of God” (dikaiosune theou, in Greek), which refers to God’s own righteousness as demonstrated by God’s faithfulness in fulfilling the covenant through Christ.
Instead, Steve Brown holds that God’s righteousness has been “imputed” to us and so we must relinquish any notion of sin as defeating us or distancing us from God and God’s love. And if we don’t then he is saying that we are being blasphemous because God’s righteousness is now ours and that God’s righteousness is too grand and majestic to allow anything—anything—ever to taint or diminish it.
Now I think that in the abstract his notion is correct (i.e., that God’s own righteousness cannot be doubted or impeached), but the transposition of that notion on to us, through Jesus, is not what Paul is communicating. And neither is it what I am communicating.
So for Steve Brown we have “3 free sins” because nothing—nothing—Christians do can separate us from God and God’s love because of Christ’s death on the cross. But I am saying that nothing can separate anyone—anyone, Christian or no—from the love of God because of who God is.
Moreover, on my definition I would say we “no free sins,” because every act, disposition, thought, etc. that puts me into improper relationship with myself, my fellows, my world, and with God (this is my definition of sin) is moving me further from my goal and not closer to it. For what is the goal of one who is in love? It is to be with the beloved, to be close to that one, engaged with that one.
So it is not a question of “what will be held against us” or of God loving us less on account of our wrongdoing. Rather, it is a question of who we are and where we are versus who and where we long to be as those beloved of (and in love with) God. In this context sin is not something that counts against us but that which keeps, to whatever degree, the lover from the beloved.
The pivotal point is this: it is not only that God loves me but that I love God, because the fitting response to love—to one who in truth knows me more truly that I know myself and who, in love, loves me more deeply than I love myself—is love.
And in this sense we come full circle in that we fulfill a command (“Love the lord your God”) that is our greatest command and yet which is our greatest joy to fulfill. And indeed, how much more could the “law be written within my heart” than that it is my greatest joy to fulfill my greatest command?
Why am I a Christian? Because I have fallen in love with God. And as I hope that I have been able to explain clearly, I mean this both:
a) in the sense that I believe in Christianity because God has captured my heart (and I wish it always to remain with God, who is my beloved) and
b) in the sense that my Christianity is confirmed in that I fulfill God’s commandments (of which the greatest is to love God) as my own deepest desire.
So I am not saying that sin is unimportant, but rather that it is not the problem. It is not unimportant, but neither is it primary. The problem is that our ability to relate / be in relationship with God was / has been / can again become sundered, and this at any point regardless of whether we are Christians or not (though clearly this will have little relevance for non-Christians).
Likewise the primary focus is that God loves us. God desires us. God longs to hear our voices. And the natural correlate to love–the appropriate response to this love–is love. Thus it is not that God loves me less when I sin, but that I cannot love / relate to / be with God as I long to when I sin.
This means two things:
First, it means that I suffer the loss of reveling in my beloved, who is God. I crave closeness with God because of the wonder, joy, and peace that I experience when in right relationship with God, and so suffer the loss of these when I am not as close as I can be to God. Second, however, it actually also means that I suffer the loss of myself.
What do I mean? This: I do not primarily love Jesus because of what he has done but because of what he is doing! Or better, the reality of what Jesus has done on the cross is viscerally embraced (as the act of love that it is) and cultivates its most fitting response (that is, my love back towards God) insofar as we experience God’s love towards us and for us in the ‘here and now’.
Stated differently Christianity is not a historical devotion, not a religion of the past. Jesus died on the cross and that was once, for all. Believing that Jesus’ death on the cross has somehow fulfilled the covenant and played a crucial role in bringing about God’s Kingdom (and fostering right relationship between me and God thereby) I may be in awe or reverence, I may feel gratitude, guilt, or relief. But I did not come to love God because of it.
Rather, where this single grand and majestic act of faithfulness on God’s part (God’s covenant faithfulness, as I discussed above) has changed the entire cosmos, it has its counterpart in that Jesus not only healed but heals now. He not only healed this one and that one in the past but also can (and in ways to be discussed another time) must heal ongoingly, and desires to heal even me.
In other words, I also–and more so–love God for love of the ‘me’ that I am becoming in being healed and made whole through being in right relationship with God. I love the self that I am–and am becoming–when I am with God, for when I am in right relationship with God I become whom I most want to be: my best self. And should this be any surprise? For God sees us not only as we are, but as we best could be. Like a parent who sees the true nature and best possibilities within in their child, how much more so does God see truly who we could be?
And indeed, how much more so is God able to bring this about?
God does so not be forcing or controlling but by wooing and inviting, not by playing to our fears but by calling out our deepest desires. And through healing me and ongoingly renewing me God ‘gives me back to myself’ as more the self I desire to be than ever I could have hoped to become on my own.
In light of this, how could I not love myself more (and better) and so how could I not grieve–all the more–when I create distance between me and God?
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