In Process: Sin and the Human Condition

Our gratitude to Eric Rose who asks this question: "Are we truly flawed creations or simply unfinished?"

It's a great question, although incredibly complex because hidden within it is ideological warfare that is nearly two millennia old. Are human beings innately good? Or innately evil? Do they have free will? Or is their will limited in the containers of their humanity, if at least not by sin, then by the fact that human beings have very real limitations?

Martin Luther, the Augustinian monk for whom our tribe is named took his cues from an African theologian named St. Augustine on this account. Augustine asserted that we were all born into sin, a sin whose roots could be traced back to an event that occurred in the Garden of Eden. Christians (those who believe this) have called this event The Fall, or the introduction of sin into the human family. When the first man and first woman ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, purposefully disobeying God's command in an attempt to be like God himself, sin entered the world for the first time. Augustine asserted that sin was then transmitted from one generation to the next in the very act of sex itself beginning with the offspring of this couple.

St. Augustine didn't have a very high view of human beings. This was in part autobiographical. Augustine really, really struggled with his versions of sin into his adulthood - and you guessed it - they were primarily sexual. But alas we find in this the truth of theology...that often our best theology is in fact biographical and as we hand it on we are handing on a statement as much about ourselves as what we believe about God.

Because of all of this Lutherans have tended to land on the "humans as worms" side of the argument. We note of course, several things. Human beings really do struggle with sin...e.g. being turned in on ourselves. Our consciousnesses are delimited. We see the world through the vantage point of one primary human being whose awareness, knowledge, insight, and maturity has very real restrictions. And because we acknowledge the reality of sin operating in the human being and human institutions (made up of human beings), we posit (because Luther did) that we don't actually have free will. Certainly you can get up this morning and make autonomous decisions about whether to go to work or not, which stores you would like to stop by, which girl or guy you'd like to call for a date tonight. You get the point. But when it comes to choosing a relationship with God, we find ourselves, as did our forebears witnessed in the Scriptures, chronically unfaithful. We human beings, turned in on ourselves, are hopelessly self-centered it seems.

But I'd like to take you, if you'll permit me, to a trans-Lutheran vantage point for a moment. St. Augustine seemed to forget that even if his take on the Garden of Eden is accurate (and there is every reason to question this BTW), when building our human anthropology (understanding of people), we must begin, theologically, not with The Fall, but with The Creation....a creation in which, after making us Imagio Dei (in the image of God), God looked at us, as he did with the rest of the creation, and said, "Wow, that's good."

Good. Not perfect. Good.

Perfect things are pristinated. They've arrived. They don't change. They can't, by definition be in process or in relationship, because these sorts of things need room for some autonomy, decision, possibility, opportunity, to engage and respond and mature in relationship with God, with life, and with one another. Which means that ugliness, and hurt and harm, and un-loving things must be as much allowed for as their opposites.

Personally, I wish Augustine had spend more time in Jewish thought. When the Jews read the narrative of the Garden of Eden, they don't see The Fall. They see the end of innocence. They see human beings coming into self-awareness. Self aware people can see their own nakedness. Those who have come of age learn, quickly enough, that life is full of trial and difficulty and pain as you step into the adult accoutrements of life (e.g. sex, childbirth, raising a family, building a home, putting food on the table, etc.).

And so I think this brings us to the answer to your question. I don't think we are innately flawed. I actually think we are all right smack dab within the design specifications of our Maker. Which means we are made, not in sin, but in goodness. But we are made, necessarily incomplete. Life for us can never be fully autonomous. Designed for our Maker, we find at some deep level of being longing for him. And designed for one another, we find ourselves reaching out in human community. But because we are limited, and because our own awarenesses are located in mere fragments of the whole, we find that in our pursuit of life we sin, missing the mark of the wholeness towards which we are called. And at times, we get so locked up in our prisons of individuality that we make ourselves and our desires and our wills the totality of our existence, and assert these things as the totality of others' existences as well. And it's at this point that evil enters the world.

Pastor Jared and I will talk about this more later, but this should advance the conversation just a bit. Looking forward to hearing from you all your feedback!

Peace and all that is good. In process with you...

Pastor Nathan