Our Broadest Insult to God

There is a certain piece of housekeeping I need to perform, though it might seem odd to describe it so mundanely.  Actually, this piece of "housekeeping" will highlight how "mundane" must be all the aspects of what we can claim to understand as "life."  All of life is interconnected, and that is part of what "Roused, Readied, Reaped" entails--we are thrown into a set of circumstances, we are shaped by that set of circumstances, and we must expect fundamental and permanent consequences at the end (insofar as we can understand "the end.")  The importance of "fundamental and permanent consequences" becomes all the more acute for us when we understand that we are not passive experiencers of the arcs of our lives--we respond to them, and we are responsible for how we respond.

All of this leads to the concept of sin, that indescribably great and horrid thing that separates us from the relationship we would want with God.  Unfortunately, the conventional faiths tend to act like sin is some conceivable "thing" that affects our existence.  Sin "infects the world," sin "separates us from fellowship with God," sin "came into the world (or into humanity's world) with the Fall."  What all of this (treating sin as a conceivable "thing") tends to do is to minimize sin, as though sin was to be understood as a more-or-less manageable negative aspect of our existence.

Sin is not an aspect of our existence.  Sin is what makes our existence different from the utterly different other existence without sin that was intended for us.  The very idea that sin can be localized, quantified, or conceptualized as a pollutant in our existence is wrong.  We ought to take as our initial clue in this matter God's warning that "sin" was lurking at the door of Cain.  From the start, and throughout, the Scriptures treat mentions of "sin" as proffered metaphors--"sin" itself cannot be described, because sin affects fundamentally every aspect of existence that we experience.  We live in the sin existence, and we strive for the non-sin existence.

The internalized striving for the "non-sin" existence is of course ultimately undefinable, but then so is the undefinable experience of "being" as against the quintessentially unprovable contention that we ever did not exist.  Conventional Christianity has operated throughout with disdain against the fundamental epistemological questions of philosophy.  The solipsist, and (in our day) the postulator of life as a computer simulation, are held up to ridicule.  Existence just exists, and the philosopher is an impious and internally false justifier of his or her unbelief--or so says conventional Christianity.

This is all well and good, with one great exception.  We can say that existence "just is," and we can reckon quite reasonably and humbly that we will be haunted by the undeniable fact that we are effectively defining existence by the fact that it exists.  The chief problem with Christianity's sense of self-justification, however, lies in the notion that the "salvation economy" (or whatever) is meant to allow us an escape from the effects of "sin" as a conceptualizable element of existence.  This is unsurprising--if existence "just is," then describing sin as a "thing" places sin (no matter how amorphously or multi-faceted in description) into "existence," into "the world."

When Jesus tells The Woman Caught in Adultery to "sin no more," he is quite well aware of two things.  Firstly, the woman will sin more in her life (presumably including sin in lust or devaluation of herself in improper relationships), something that she would do well to strive against.  And secondly, the woman, were she ever accused again, cannot rely on Jesus to be there to save her.  The woman is caught between the existential (we are all sinners) and the practical (we can all expect earthly consequences of sin.)  Jesus is warning the woman against the sin-existence which is the only existence we know.

The Woman Caught in Adultery is a problem for the churches because, one, she neither expresses remorse nor pleads for mercy, and two, because Jesus provides no rationale by which her release from condemnation can be taken as other than happenstance.  Why does Jesus not condemn her, and why does Jesus makes his lack of condemnation presumably total as regards her sin?  (Jesus, after all, cannot be understood as merely reassuring the woman that he will not throw rocks at her, sinful creature though she be.)  Of course the notion of a quantifiable instance of sin, isolated from a larger world in which "sin" exists, is not the notion of the story (though the churches will disgrace themselves in contortions such as "The accusation against the woman alone was obviously a set-up.")

No, the story of The Woman Caught in Adultery is a story not of "sin" (which is only ever describable in lesser conceptualizations or manifestations) but a story that takes place in our sin-existence, an existence that hems us in as surely as its "blank grey wall" of "the future" I described in the previous post.  The idea of sin is always inadequate, which is why the topic of sin must always be understood in that it cannot be understandable, any more than we can understand our existence by placing ourselves in a vantage-point above it.  No one will ever "understand" the chopping off of hands or feet to escape sin, any more than anyone will ever "understand" how humanity can forgive sins or how humanity can share each other's sins by failing to forgive them.

We can say that "sin" as a thing in the world (or in a larger "world" of the supernatural) is a thing that separates us from God, but one would not (in view of the gospel testimony) do well to argue with Jesus to the effect that God has ratified that pronouncement.  We are separated, rather, from God's stated intent to house us in an existence free from sin, which is to say, a completely different existence from the one we know.  The "connection" (which is an inadequate metaphor) we have with the non-sin existence is as tenuous and indefinable as any connection we might have with any existence larger than our personal experience-fields.  In the great puzzle of existence, we in our birthing into the world reach out (literally and figuratively) as infants to that which we love and long to be loved by.  Arguing about whether we are initially innocent or merely bathed in the receding glow of pre-creation innocence would be ridiculous--neither notion need distract us from Jesus' admonition that we need to become like little children.

When Jesus says that we, being evil, know how to give good things to our children, he is saying nothing any more remarkable than, "You, being of limited intellectual capacity, know how to give good things to your children."  God knows how to reach into the existence of sin and minister to us (which is not to say that we will like it.)  Sin is existence-wide--for us.  "Sin" does not have to be shrunk into a universe-wide, conceptualizable opponent of God and God's people, and to attempt this effectual shrinkage by describing sin as an isolatable concept renders insult to God.