p. 54.
In coming to the topic of sin I shall similarly begin with the universal Christian statement that sin is separation from God. What does that mean? How is it interpreted?
We misunderstand this concept if we regard it only as a moral concept, if here we think only of the sins which we all commit: lying, stealing, murdering, deceiving. That is bad enough, but what we mean by the singular - sin, the fundamental sin, the primal sin - is something else: it is a state, not an action.
With a frightful concept which does not occur in the Bible but has played a role in tradition, in contrast to actual sin as the deliberate violation of God's law this primal sin is called 'original sin'.
biological fax X
What it meant is that we are born into conditions in which we do not cause sin but already live in sin.
p. 55.
In fact only the person who is free is capable of guilt. But if I am capable of guilt, i.e., am free, that is as it were one side of the coin. The other side is the fate of the sin into which I am born. We do not seek out for ourselves the society in which we live and the place we have in it, but are born into something which is already determined by the structures of sin, of separation from God.
So, put in New Testament terms, sin is a power which rules over us. .... the sin to which I feel subjected by birth, time and place, and by my life.
I (one of the German post-generations after the Nazi regime - being German after Auschwitz) am already subject to the rule of terror. Paul describes the rule of sin with the metaphors of the Roman Empire. Sin rules, subjects, conquers, pays out wages, spreads terror and death. Paul identifies sin in its context in social history. So "I" too already, speaking in terms of the present, live under violent forces: militarism, the wasting of energy, the consumption of meat, exploitation. If this is understood as the terror exercised by sin, the question then becomes how I react to it.
P. 56.
Those are the two elements which we must always hold together. One element is fate, inheritance, involvement, social compulsion, the power of sin (the objective element) - and the subjective element is my will in this, the involvement of my own action, my freedom, my decision.
We need forgiveness, reconciliation, the possibility of a new beginning. In the Christian liturgy the "Lord, have mercy" the Kyrie eleison, expresses most clearly this consciousness of sin, which brings together guilt and fate, psychological and sociological misery. Only if we learn to pray it with our whole heart do we understand the meaning of sin.
Understanding of Sin in the orthodox tradition
- separation from God. Human beings put themselves in the place of God: that is central to the understanding of sin in the orthodox tradition.
- Adam - wanting to be like God.(St. Augustine: the story of the fall.)
Adam was free. He had all that he could wish, but he wanted more,
namely to be independent of God.
[quoting from St. Augustine] to longings that cannot be fulfilled, to concupiscence,
to the misdirected love.
p. 57 self-love. anyone who wants nothing but self-realization and autonomy.
In so doing he sinned; he rejected the limitation of being human
and denied the creatureliness in which we live.
In this sense sin is idsobedience not only against particular commandments
but against createdness.
Greek 'hybris': presumption, arrogance, self-love.
Sin whispers to us that the limitations of the creature should and can fall away;
our temporal limitations (we do not have unlimited time),
our physical limitations (we do not have unlimited power),
and our spiritual limitations (we cannot understand everything) are all pushed on one side...
p. 58.
But precisely within the orthodox understanding there is a danger which I call the anthropological pessimism of Protestantism. That is a feeling in which sin, guilt, helplessness and despair come together.
It can be asked what function talk of sin has, and for what it is used.
It can be sued in order to keep people down, keep them conscious of guilt and helpless, but it can also be thought of as an instrument for analysing the situation, in which the aim remains the overcoming of this separation from the ground of life. Only if we stand with one foot already on the new land of forgiveness and grace do we talk rightly of sin. If, on the other hand, we attempt to belittle and mock efforts at change, steps on the way to conversion, because after all we are all sinners, sin is ontologized and made something eternal - and liberation becomes uncertain. we cannot know anything, we cannot trust ousrselves, we cannot do anything - those are the most godless statements of the present, which in apparent humility, apparent obedience, no longer take account of God's action to us and in us.
Many Protestants do not believe in God's gracious acquittal, but only in their own captivity and oppression under sin; they confuse real guilt, which changes us because it can be forgiven, with neurotic guilt-feelings, from which the helpless 'I' sees no release.
(Romans 5:12; 7:14, 7:17) traditional systematic theology has contributed greatly to a false ontologizing of sin, to misunderstanding it as individual helplessness.
Understanding of Sin in the Liberal Tradition
sin as a lack of love (of one another)
based on the real experience that we all have and that even a little honesty compels us to concede:
- we do not love one another
isolated from the universe and neighbours (Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834))
limited to self-related interests.
Isolation and cutting onself off from the feeling of 'absolute dependence'
piety: is this, that we are aware of ourselves as absolutely dependent or, which amounts to the same thing,
as in relationship with God.
p. 60.
easiest for modern men and women to understand - even if I am not convinced that I was conceived and born in sin, that I constantly sin in the sense that I commit actual individual sins, I can realize that love is always greater and requires more than what I am and do. I do not live up to it.
Only if one understands the distinctive concept of love more deeply than is suggested by our world, and recognizes love as the only criterion: only then do we understand how far we fall short of it and do not fulfill it. This is where I [Dorothee Solle] see the strength of liberal exegesis, and also its weakness, which lies in the fact that it does not consider love and the need of the human person for relationships radically enough. Therefore sin appears as an individual deficiency, as failure, as remaining in egoism, but not as a structural power which dominates us and destroys us.
Understanding of Sin in the Liberation movement.
p. 60.
While I [Dorothee Solle] was still speculating on self-love, power and isolation, a black woman pastor interrupted me and said: "But it's quite clear. Adam and Eve wanted to have more than others and so they ate the apple, and that is covetousness. Sin is the immeasurable greed of people who want to possess something, and everything else follows from this desire to possess."
I had never thought of it like that before. But it is clear that the poor read the Bible and tradition with different eyes from ours. In a situation of exploitation and under the fearful pressure of those who possess everything at the cost of the exploitation of the masses, it is much more natural also to read the story of the fall not simply as the story of a father-child relationship with prohibition and transgression, but in terms of greed, covetousness, avarice.
p. 61.
In the theology which I learned there was never any reflection on the apple, or if there was, at best it was in jest. Thought had a strictly personal orientation: God and the human couple, creator and creature, authority and freedom, prohibition and disobedience, stood in the centre.
Latin American theology extracts quite a different side from the web of symbols: covetousness as what separates human beings from God.
Human alienation
For a rising European theology of liberation this criticism of human alienation, promoted by Hegel and carried through by Karl Marx, is automatically central, because Marx, turning Hegel upside down, noted alienation in the conditions of production in industrialism.
> four different forms of alienation
the working person is alienated 1) from herself
2) from nature
3) from her fellow human beings
4) from the human race
p. 62.
The second form of alienation is that of the person next to me, who may not be a sister or brother, friend or helper, but has to be an enemy or a rival. That is also clear from experience on the conveyor belt, where human relationships are regulated by the speed of the belt. If an 'agitator' arrives who speeds it up without the workers immediately noticing, then the relationship between the deteriorates:
offence, anger, envy, hatred against one another arise. Charlie Chaplin gave an unsurpassed account of this in Modern Times.
p. 63.
The competitive society in which I have to be better, get better pay, perform better, be utterly original and stand out, is an expression of the alienation of a people from their neighbours.
The third from of alienation is that from nature.
- masters and owners of nature, as the Enlightenment put it,
nature as the dead material
people understand themselves as lords over the whole, not as part of the whole
The fourth alienation identified by Marx is that from our 'species', i.e. our membership of the human race.
We deny our solidarity, we destroy our belonging to other members of the human family and privatize ourselves in our own careers, so that it is regarded as almost unnatural and absurd even to pay any attention to others on whom we dump our toxic waste or to whom we sell our weapons.
p. 66.
The Sin of Women
in the form of self-denial.
The sin of women is not that we think too highly about ourselves, that we have too much self-confidence, that we develop too much human pride or human hybris, but on the contrary, that we are too yielding, that we practise too much self-denial and obedience, by giving up pride and self-determination.
As Valerie Saiving writes: "A mother also experiences that a woman can surrender too much of herself, so that nothing remains of her uniqueness. She can become a mere nothing, almost a zero, without value for herself, for her fellow human beings or perhaps for God. For the temptations fro a woman as woman are not the same temptations as those for a man as man."
[From her personal story] That means that I practised a degree of self-denial to protect myself and presented myself as being more naive than I really was. ...
p. 67.
In theological terms that means that for me as a woman pride is not really sin, but rather something that I still have to learn. The male conception of the person who rebels against God by affirming himself, by acting proudly, arrogantly and without constraints, is not a woman's concern. Rather we women are in danger of not developing any pride, of never becoming independent, of constantly remaining within all too narrow boundaries.
As specifically feminine failings which are diametrically opposed to those of men, Valerie Saiving lists:
'Triviality, liability to distraction, talkativeness, lack of concentration and dependence on others for one's own self-determination....Tolerance at the cost of standards...inability to respect the limits of the private sphere..., sentimentality, love of gossip and mistrust of the understanding - in short, underdevelopment or negation of the ego."
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