10th December 2012

In creating humankind, Christians believe God made possible evolution of discernment between what builds up and what destroys, what's healthy and what's harmful for well-being. This discernment, our moral sense, works at a collective and personal level. It can be distilled into reasoned argument, but is more complex than this. It touches on every aspect of relatedness between self, others and God. So far the word sin has not been used. It belongs at the highest level of thought about human relatedness.

Sin is identified with mistakes or decisions causing needless suffering and chaos in life. It is rooted in self-centred motivation or attitude - putting self before others and before God, if God is acknowledged at all. The Genesis stories see suffering and misfortune, guilt, shame and blame emerge from an original human disregard and rebellion against God. Sin is about refusal to relate to God and respond to One who is source of all existence. 

Sin happens because humans are free, not prevented from doing what isn't good for them. Learning is part and parcel of human destiny. We come to understand what sin is by the damage it does. Experience teaches us which actions and attitudes do us no good. We discover through the passage of life that disquieting inner longing for God is better acknowledged and explored than it is ignored.

Scripture regards sin not merely as transgression against divine order, attracting punishment for the offence, it also regards sin as a spiritual ailment to be cured if we are to 'have life and have it in abundance'. With Christianity historically a cultural force in civilisation and nation building, it was inevitable that understanding sin in terms of crime and punishment would dominate.

Different generations and cultures have imagined Hell as a place of punishment, varied in relation to what kind of retribution people fear suffering most. Dante's classic portrayal of people in Hell reflected existing hierarchical social order. Measures of punishment were meted out to different ranks of people, according to the extent they abused their abilities, power and responsibility, or else surrendering themselves to passions that betrayed their humanity. 

The seven strata of Dante's hell are named after seven deadly sins - lust, greed, pride, vanity, anger, slander, avarice - each containing the appropriate corrective, applied eternally to all refusing to recognise their faults and failings. This status quo somewhat reflects the Gospel story of Dives and Lazarus, but doesn't equate with the Petrine idea of Christ rising from the dead evangelising spirits imprisoned in Sheol.

All ultimately face judgement, evaluation of their lives and consideration of their sin. The human face of God imagined by the church in the person of Jesus is one who enquires. "What have you done?" There's more in Scripture about Jesus as diagnostician and healer than about Jesus as judge.
 

9th December 2012

The story of the Fall describes the origins of blame and shame. Questioning God's safety instructions, leads to an experiment in disobeying orders, resulting in discovery of discomforting self-awareness. God asks the couple: "What have you done?" They become anxious and insecure about taking responsibility for their actions. Each projects on the other a sense of blame for having done something with fatally dangerous consequences. Now they know something about the realities of the world. Now they must learn to fend for themselves, protect themselves from danger. It's a parable of the dynamics of human development from childhood dependency into adult autonomy and responsibility.

Like physical pain, guilt and shame are warning symptoms that something isn't right. They invoke a response to address what has gone amiss, a response which, in itself may be far from adequate to resolve the cause of the symptoms. The challenge after failure to do well, or do the right thing, is  learning the causes, not repeating a pattern leading to the same outcome. Intelligence developed across millennia, learning what gets intended results by trial and error. Humans excel at it, yet it hasn't eliminated or reduced the capacity for failure leading to guilt, shame and blame. Areas of our lives continue blighted by incapacity to learn from our errors, or from each other.

The persistence of violence as a means to resolve conflict is a key area of human failure. It concerns personal and collective relationships, it also concerns relationship to nature, ravaged by mis-use and desire to dominate and exploit it, rather than live in harmony. People and their environment are all interconnected and interdependent in a vastly complex manner. Many different, sometimes conflicting ways of understanding what's wrong and what needs doing to put things right are possible. To continue to do nothing, to deny the need to act responsibly, puts the future of humanity and the planet at risk.

Sorting out messes we have made is regarded by many as a race against time, yet others are indifferent, complacent in the face of danger. A feature of human freedom is the ability to ignore guilt and shame and suppress impulses they generate to find a remedy to underlying problems. The ultimate outcome to misuse of freedom not addressed, however great or small the issue, is needless suffering.

When people talk about Hell, they refer to a realm of unrelieved, un-necessary suffering. Some kinds of suffering are acceptable as means to an end: 'no pain no gain' is a popular phrase which refers to this, but it has nothing to do with a notion of Hell where none of the perpetual agony has any meaning. The prospect needs taking seriously, not least because such conditions seem readily reproducable in this life when we pay no attention to tackling the consequences of our errors and wrong decisions.