I was in a class this week and a student (admittedly he is more advanced in years than most of my peers) made a brief statement, being: “I spell sin with four letters: S E L F.” I quickly began searching for the meanings of such a statement and tried to discern his motivation for making it.
The first thought that comes to mind, and what he probably means, is that selfishness is the root of sin. Stealing is ‘sin’ because it pretends that the Self of the one stealing is more valuable or necessary than the one being stolen from. This is Self as the root of sin.
The other thought that comes to mind is more concerned with what the statement actually and literally says. The statement is set up like a mathematical equation: Sin = Self. This is an oversimplification. If the ‘equation’ is taken to the extreme, simply for being a Self one is synonymous with sin. Then, Jesus Christ is synonymous with Sin, because Jesus is a Self. This is absolutely unacceptable. There is a connection between self and sin (after all, it is people who sin) but it can’t be this elementary math equation.
To be a person (a Self) is much too complex and powerful and dynamic to be hopelessly condemned to SIN (as well as to be defined AS sin).
We’ve talked a bit about redemption – where does redemption come to play in this? As a person (self) how am I condemned to sin? Do we have more value than this as people belonging to God and being God’s creation?
Let’s think about this, anything can help.
-jonathan
Justin
Jonathan
***Warning this is very long and theological***
Jon,
Good post and a lot to think about. I think I would have to start with the question “how is sin defined in this “post-modern” culture we find ourselves in? Also, how does the story of Jesus’ death touch base with the life stories of contemporary Westerners in a culture that no longer believes in the reality of sin (this is just my opinion)? I see the problem as this…individuals no longer live with a sense of sin or guilt in the way that evangelists or preachers or parents or youth pastors would wish them to in order to successfully communicate the atoning work of Christ. That is, postmoderns (for a lack of a better word) are sinners with no word for it. The need is for an incarnation of atonement in the postmodernist context.
Then logically this leads to this questions…How does the postmodern experience “sin”? (And let’s assume two things: that it does experience sin at some level, and let’s also assume that the word “sin” doesn’t work for them — so we need to explore images and terms that seem to connect more with this generation. There is no reason, let me hasten to add, to think this is inherently dangerous to theology. Paul, after all, created several images for Jesus’ redemptive work. Image-exploration is always needed in good theology.)
In Mann’s book (the one I wrote a paper on) he contends that the operative word for the postmodernist is not “sin” but “shame,” and he defines shame as an “absence of mutual, intimate, undistorted relating that ultimately leads the postmodern self into a lack of ontological (or narrative) coherence” (19). Lots of verbage here, but the sense is this: postmoderns are not guilty of law because they don’t tell that “story” of sin; instead, there is an overwhelming sense that the “ideal” self and the “real” self are so far out of whack that they are “shamed” and afraid to disclose who and what they really are. A lack of inner coherence is what this shame is all about; the lack of a meaningful story or narrative that tells “my story” truly.
Important for Mann is that the postmodern self doesn’t know the “Other” (in a big, divine, sense and in a little, human, sense) and this leads to sin being the lack of self-realization. The cause of sin is victimization.
Shame is not the same as guilt, though they can overlap. Shame is about the self; guilt requires the Other. [My observation: Here we are finding a radical theory of relationality at work in defining sin]
Here’s a telling implication: “The chronically shamed, ‘sinless’ self needs to be saved — not from divine wrath, but from self-judgement, which isolates and alienates the self from (each) Other”.
Another telling insight: postmoderns are not “a”moral but “pre”moral.
And one more: the biggest issue for the postmodern here is confession, or public exposure of the real self and the public recognition that the real self is not the presented self. Atonement, he suggests, can occur for these folks in safe environments where they can hear the atonement story and where they can tell their story safely and where they can find the atonement story to be their story.
I hope this makes some sense…I have been thinking a lot about it here recently and wanted to add or take away from the conversation.