So helpful, especially alongside your reflections a few weeks ago on righteousness. I have found tragedy to be the most helpful way to understand sin.
I must say that I am jarred by the notion of sin as sand in machinery. Machinery seems like such a mechanistic way of describe the wonders of creation and the mystery of life and the tragedies of climate crises
Literary critic Terry Eagleton writes this about original sin and tragedy:
“So it seems that freedom comes to invert itself into fatality, as projects which seemed at the time transparent and intentional slip from our grasp to form a field of anonymous forces in which we are no longer able to recognize our own confiscated subjectivity. It is this ambiguous condition, one in which we are neither fully responsible nor absolved from guilt, to which Christian theology gives the name original sin---‘original’ not in the sense of dating back to an ominous encounter with a reptile in a garden but in the sense of a priori, given from the outset, transcendental rather than transcendent, inescapably intertwined with the roots of our sociality” (p. 111).
“To act in one way is to leave ourselves with a meager set of options, so that we can quickly paint ourselves into a corner. Many a tragic character ends up doing this… In this sense, we do not need the gods to deprive us of our choices, coerce us into tragic dilemmas or compel us down cul-de-sacs, since we are perfectly capable of doing all this for ourselves” (p. 114).
That's what you are getting at here, in your reflections on sin this week.
Reference
Terry Eagleton (2003). Sweet violence: The idea of the tragic. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Dr Eric- I have a request! Can you please email me the name of the poster that you have in your church that depicts all the different faces of Jesus, please?
Being both a recovering Southern Baptist and the wife of a man raised Congregationalist, I’ve pretty much had my fill of talk about sin, original or otherwise. So I became curious about how Jesus defined sin and what he had to say about it. My search returned a couple verses from Matthew and one from Paul, which basically (IMO) fell along the lines of his delineation of the greatest commandment - which was pretty clear and makes a lot of sense. Where I got lost was in that whole “sexual immorality” term, whether in Greek of Aramaic. To me, the looseness of the usage pretty much means anyone can use their own interpretation and pretty much blanket huge swaths of humanity with anathema. How convenient - and how utterly anti-greatest commandment. Two whole millennia can attest to both. Somehow I doubt that’s what Jesus intended, and yet here we still are.
So helpful, especially alongside your reflections a few weeks ago on righteousness. I have found tragedy to be the most helpful way to understand sin.
I must say that I am jarred by the notion of sin as sand in machinery. Machinery seems like such a mechanistic way of describe the wonders of creation and the mystery of life and the tragedies of climate crises
Literary critic Terry Eagleton writes this about original sin and tragedy:
“So it seems that freedom comes to invert itself into fatality, as projects which seemed at the time transparent and intentional slip from our grasp to form a field of anonymous forces in which we are no longer able to recognize our own confiscated subjectivity. It is this ambiguous condition, one in which we are neither fully responsible nor absolved from guilt, to which Christian theology gives the name original sin---‘original’ not in the sense of dating back to an ominous encounter with a reptile in a garden but in the sense of a priori, given from the outset, transcendental rather than transcendent, inescapably intertwined with the roots of our sociality” (p. 111).
“To act in one way is to leave ourselves with a meager set of options, so that we can quickly paint ourselves into a corner. Many a tragic character ends up doing this… In this sense, we do not need the gods to deprive us of our choices, coerce us into tragic dilemmas or compel us down cul-de-sacs, since we are perfectly capable of doing all this for ourselves” (p. 114).
That's what you are getting at here, in your reflections on sin this week.
Reference
Terry Eagleton (2003). Sweet violence: The idea of the tragic. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Dr Eric- I have a request! Can you please email me the name of the poster that you have in your church that depicts all the different faces of Jesus, please?
Being both a recovering Southern Baptist and the wife of a man raised Congregationalist, I’ve pretty much had my fill of talk about sin, original or otherwise. So I became curious about how Jesus defined sin and what he had to say about it. My search returned a couple verses from Matthew and one from Paul, which basically (IMO) fell along the lines of his delineation of the greatest commandment - which was pretty clear and makes a lot of sense. Where I got lost was in that whole “sexual immorality” term, whether in Greek of Aramaic. To me, the looseness of the usage pretty much means anyone can use their own interpretation and pretty much blanket huge swaths of humanity with anathema. How convenient - and how utterly anti-greatest commandment. Two whole millennia can attest to both. Somehow I doubt that’s what Jesus intended, and yet here we still are.