conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

roger williams is blue like jazz: part, the second

"Actually," I told him reluctantly, "I have always agreed with the idea that we have a sin nature. I don't think it looks exactly like the fundamentalists say it does, 'cause I know so many people who do great things, but I do buy the idea that we are flawed, that there is something in us that is broken."
- Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz (p. 17)

Miller was raised in a more conservative evangelicalism than I currently practice. Heh. That's not too hard. I know. He's obligated somehow to figure out the place of sin in his how journey. And, honestly, I think it is a worthwhile thing for all of us. Though it is often assumed that liberal protestants have no sense of sin, nothing could be further from the truth. There is sin. No question. It's just that the doctrines so long held don't necessarily speak to people...all people.

I think we need to speak about sin. And I think we need to call it sin. But we need to do so without slipping in to some vague moralism. This, to me is what Miller is after. Moralism does not introduce us to God. It only punishes or rewards. And that does not grow a Christian. A Christian is someone who is in a relationship with God s revealed in the ministry of Jesus Christ. It is, first and foremost, a relationship with a loving and living God. It is not moralism.

Ben Campbell said this about Original Sin.

Original sin is corporate and contextual, not individual. Therein, probably, lies our greatest difficulty in understanding it in the Western world. Here in the world's West we neither have a good sense of what is corporate, nor a good sense of history. Original sin is not some native ugliness or predisposition to evil in the innocent infant which accounts for what we are describing. It is, rather, that there is no place to be born except a certain household in a certain place in a certain society at a certain time.

No place, no society, and no time is innocent. It may be that other cultures understand this better than the American culture, -- but it may not: the capacity in any culture for denial is obvious to all but the citizens of the culture itself.(pdf link)

This is a helpful way to begin understanding how we sin, how we slip up and hurt one another whether we mean to or not. Follow the link to read the whole article. It was published in a recent newsletter from Richmond Hill.

We need to look at systems (familial, ecclesial, political, economic) and see how we hurt one another, how we have been hurt. Sin is a wound. Sin is connected to our decisions. And the cure for sin (if there is such a thing) is our relationship with God. A societal hand slap is not the same thing...It may help with the symptom of sin (violence, theft, etc), but it only treats the symptom.

Okay...This is huge. I'm circling the airport. I'm looking forward to the session in a couple of Sundays.

Posted by tripp at April 24, 2008 08:28 AM