“Original Blessing, Original Sin”
5
March 2017
Homily
Delivered the First Sunday in Lent Year A
8
a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish
Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
The
Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Genesis
2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11; Psalm 32
God,
give us hearts to feel and love; take away our hearts of stone, and give us
hearts of flesh. Amen
When we lived in Shanghai, Elena had a
startling experience. She was teaching
at an international school. One day in
chapel, she asked the children who we are, expecting, of course, something like
“child of God” or “follower of Jesus.” But one of the first graders, the son of a
Consulate colleague and friend of mine raised his hand excitedly. “We are all sinners, hopelessly depraved in
how we think, feel, and act. It’s only
through Jesus that we can be saved.” When
Elena told me the story, all I could say was, “I knew his father was a
Calvinist,” I replied, “but not quite that
Calvinist!”
The image of this earnest seven year
old thinking so ill of himself troubled us.
How might it affect his self-image?
Both of us were raised in a tradition that intentionally rejected the
doctrine of original sin. As children
ourselves, we had both memorized our church’s Articles of Faith, including, “We
believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s
transgression.”
We had seen in our four children, newly
born, the beauty of God’s creation, and the warmth and power of God’s love. How could anyone teach their children that they
were monsters, deformed and depraved, bent beyond all hope of doing anything
good, let alone being good? But then we
had to raise those children: a constant effort to civilize the little creatures
and teach fairness and consideration for others. They may have come innocent
from the heart of God when they were born, but they clearly were not the complete
persons God intended.
John Phillip Newell writes: “If a child
grows up being told she is ugly or stupid or selfish, at some point, she comes
to believe that about herself. The
descriptions haunt her self-understanding, and she lives in a state of doubt
about her deepest identity. This is exactly
what happened in relation to the doctrine of original sin, a belief that has
dominated the landscape of Western Christian thought and practice from the
fourth century. It teaches that what is
deepest in us is opposed to God rather than of God” (Christ and the Celts, pp. 18-19).
He notes that 4th century British monk Pelagius was declared
a heretic for opposing the doctrine of original sin, a martyr to what Newell calls
“the Imperial church,’ the church of Constantine and the newly baptized Roman
Empire.
Newell here is right in rejecting the morbid
form of original sin taught by Augustine and Calvin. But original sin as taught by the church--both Eastern and Western, Roman, Orthodox, and Anglican--has
always been broader: it meant we were
impaired, but not depraved. Only some Protestants
pushed the doctrine of total depravity.
Pelagius was not excommunicated for his
affirmation of basic human goodness. The
Councils at first agreed with Pelagius’ criticism of Augustine—that he was
importing a false Manichean contempt of the flesh into Christian teaching. But they ultimately condemned Pelagius for
intransigence. They wanted him to accept
that we all need God’s grace, and truly so.
But he appeared to them to insist that we could gain righteousness and
salvation in theory at least through our own choices and actions. Like most condemned by the early church as
heretics, the issue was not a lack of truth, but insistence on that truth to the
exclusion of a more inclusive and comprehensive truth taught in scripture and
accepted by the Church. Such people as
St. David (Dewy), bishop of Wales, himself a Celt deeply grounded in the
spiritual traditions of the original peoples of the British Isles, within a
hundred years taught regularly against Pelagius because of his understanding of
Christianity, not despite it.
The Pelagians were known for their high
morals and insistence on right choices.
But they could offer little to those
who had difficulty with sin, particularly obsessive or compulsive sin, other
than “try harder” and “look to Jesus’ example,” which was, for them solely how
grace worked. When this failed to get people
driven by sexual urges, or addictions to clean up their acts, Pelagians simply
tossed them out of the Church as lost causes.
But the Catholic Church—the inclusive
Church, the church of the whole (katholikos)—always wanted to keep hope and
engagement for people, especially sinners.
It never wanted to simply keep itself pure by defining the impure out. It
was the narrowness of Pelagius’ vision, not its breadth, that got him into
trouble.
I saw this in my own Mormon upbringing. In that Pelagian church you had a sense of
free will and original blessing, to be sure, but you also were ill-prepared to
cope with actual sin and the slavery that sin brings with it. Mormon belief in free will and human natural
innocence tends to exclude the possibility of God’s love and help if you have
the misfortune of a repeated, besetting sin, especially one dealing with sex,
drink, or drugs. If you couldn’t clean
up your act, you were hopeless, and expelled.
Those who ended up in desperation going into 12 Step programs ran
head-long into a road block: the first step was always “we admitted that we
were powerless, and that our lives had become unmanageable.” To rely on grace, admission of powerlessness
was first necessary. You had to give up
any notion of free will to have any traction with problems this big.
There has been a lot of talk of late
about the conflict between the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of
original blessing. Because of the mischief
wrought by the distorted and pathological teaching of Augustine and Calvin,
these two doctrines are often put in opposition to each other: original sin OR original blessing. But the scriptural and catholic teaching here
is BOTH/AND not EITHER/OR.
The Priestly story of creation in
Genesis 1 says it clearly: we are God’s beautiful and good creatures. We are in the image and likeness of God. The Psalter teaches we are but a little lower
than the angels. Original blessing—the
basic goodness at the heart of humanity—is scriptural teaching. God’s image is woven throughout our nature, no
matter how we may have broken or twisted it.
If it were somehow pulled out of the warp and woof of our beings, we
would, simply, unravel. Original
blessing is scriptural.
But then so is original sin, the
seeming universal tendency we all have toward brokenness. Today’s story from Genesis chapter 2 is
often called “the Fall of Adam and Eve” but it is most definitely NOT history. Modern
biblical scholarship and theology are unanimous that when we read scripture paying
due attention to the literary forms it uses, it is clear we Genesis 1-11
contains origin myths and legends.
Genesis 2 is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or
Every Man and Every Woman. It is about
each and every one of us, and the predicament we find ourselves in regarding
evil, sin, and knowing the difference between good and bad.
We often lose sight of this
because of the historicized way these stories are commonly read, a process
helped along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in today’s reading from Romans
5. But even here, note that Paul says Adam passed sin to his descendants
“because all have sinned,” not “so that they all sin,” or “be punished for a
sin not theirs.” Paul in these chapters
portrays Sin, the Law, and Death as characters in a great drama spread over the
centuries. We should take him at his word
and recognize that these are personifications of things we deal with every day,
not historical description.
St. Augustine believed that
sin in our origins was a moral contamination transmitted through the very act
that generates children, sex, which he sees in the symbol of eating the
forbidden fruit in the Genesis story. Calvin taught that we are totally
depraved. But neither of these are scriptural
teachings. This story does not teach that sexual sin corrupted our first
parents and transmitted corruption to us all. Instead, it tells of figures
representing each one of us who go astray. And go astray we do, all of
us. The greatest proof of the truth of the teaching of a “Fall of Humankind,”
is not to be found in the fossil record. It is to be found by looking in
the mirror.
One of the reasons the
Councils condemned Pelagius was that his teaching seemed to go against an
almost universal practice of the Church, infant baptism. But again, here the issue is not so much the
need to remove some inherited stain and sin, but rather to show that as we are born,
we stand in need of God and the community of family and church.
Paul goes to the heart of
the matter later in Romans when he talks about indwelling sin: “So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil
is right there with me. For
in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law
at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner
of the law of sin at work within me. What
a wretched man I am!” See? We
are all in God’s image. We want to do
good. But we feel driven to distort the
image, to be broken. We are sinners,
driven by some mysterious element in who we are. Paul continues: “Who will rescue me from this body
subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me
through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:21-25)
In the name of Christ,
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment