Marc Chagall, Expulsion from Eden (1961)
“Wonderfully Created, More Wonderfully Restored”
1March 2020
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,
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. 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.
Both of us were raised in a tradition that rejected the doctrine of
original sin. 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, 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 Constantine’s “Imperial church.”
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—Eastern
and Western, Roman, Orthodox, and Anglican—has always been broader: it meant we were impaired, but not
depraved. Only some Protestants—but not
all—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 whose feast day is today, March 1, 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, I think mainly out of pastoral
concern over the effects of his teaching.
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 Latter-day
Saint 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. This forces many to pay a high
psychological cost for this thoroughgoing Pelagianism: people with obsessive or compulsive problems,
including addictions, were often seen as wholly unregenerate and willful,
stubborn in their sins because they could just not seem to be able to pull up
their socks, change their behavior, and stop relapsing. I knew many Mormons who had a hard time
mouthing the words of, let alone believing, the first part of any of the 12
Step Programs: “We admitted that we were powerless and that our lives had
become unmanageable.” This, despite the LDS Church’s endorsement in the 1980s of
the Twelve Steps as a therapeutic and pastoral program.
We often hear 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, 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: Genesis 1-11 contains origin myths and
legends, not history. 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 “with the result that all sin.” 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. No—Paul is teaching that just
as we lose our innocence and true humanity by participating in the defection of
humankind, so also we regain life and wholeness through participating in
Christ.
Augustine of Hippo
Jaundiced by his own
history of besetting sexual sin, St. Augustine believed that sin was a moral
contamination transmitted through the very act that generates children, sex. For him, the forbidden fruit in the Genesis
story was sexual knowledge. Calvin taught that this results in universal depravity. But neither of these are scriptural
teachings. This story does not teach that the sexual act 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 or in lists of scriptural
proof-texts. 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.
It took me years to understand what
the true teaching of the Christian Church on such things was: the doctrine original sin is not so much a
doctrine of inborn depravity and universally merited punishment as it is an
affirmation that, as good as creation and human life are, we are in the final
analysis unable to do it all ourselves.
God’s creative work in us is not yet finished, and we need to get out of
the way to let God finish the task of creating us as something “good, very
good.” As the first collect in the Liturgy of the
Word for the Great Vigil of Easter puts it: “O God, who wonderfully created,
and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we
may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity,
your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”
In the name of Christ,
Amen.
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