169 - Whatever Happened to the Doctrine of Sin?

Whatever Happened to the Doctrine of Sin?
By David H. Kelsey

"I want to suggest that the doctrine of sin is vigorously alive but has migrated. It has moved into different contexts provided by various doctrinal loci; it has moved under the pressure of subtly different judgments about what the basic gist is of the Christian message; and the effects of the moves are pastorally, morally, and even politically practical. We can broadly map the doctrine's migration by noting its traditional home and sketching three trajectories along which it has migrated."

Published just twenty years ago, Karl Menninger's popular book, Whatever Became of Sin?,¹ gave voice to a widespread suspicion that the concept "sin" was steadily evaporating from everyday life. Culture in gereral aside, by century's end, people concerned specifically about the health of Christian systematic theology-especially if they had been formed by mid-century theological controversies-are entitled to suspect that the doctrine of sin was somehow evaporating from formal theology as well. After all, by mid-century the clearest line dividing the older, beleaguered Protestant "liberalism" from the newer, unhelpfully labeled "neoorthodoxy" had been the distinction between the "optimistic" view that human nature was progressively improving beyond sin and the "pessimistic" view that human nature is inherently and structurally "estranged." The last quarter of the century, however, has been dominated by discussions of theologies of "critical correlation" with general human experience, theologies of "liberation" and theologies of "hope." The doctrine of sin may no longer seem prominent in the conversation. If this suspicion were true, it would be of profound importance for the social as well as the intellectual history of Christianity, because the doctrine of sin is one of those doctrines in which Christian life-forming is held closest to Christian truth-claiming, practical theology closest to dogmatic theology. What has happened to the doctrine of sin?

I want to suggest that the doctrine of sin is vigorously alive but has migrated. It has moved into different contexts provided by various doctrinal loci; it has moved under the pressure of subtly different

David H. Kelsey is Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. Among his recent books are To Understand God Truly: What's Theological About a Theological School (1992) and Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate (1993).

¹ Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973).

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judgments about what the basic gist is of the Christian message; and the effects of the moves are pastorally, morally, and even politically practical. We can broadly map the doctrine's migration by noting its traditional home and sketching three trajectories along which it has migrated.

I

"The" doctrine of sin whose present health and whereabouts are under investigation is broadly Augustinian. It holds closely together two definitions of sin, which it struggles to keep coherent: sin as "actual sin" and sin as "original sin." "Actual sin" is sin seen (with plenty of support from the Old and New Testaments) as a set of acts done consciously and deliberately against God's will. "Original sin" (following St. Paul's teaching and other Christians' experience of moral conflict) is seen as a state of corruption of the created human will caused in us by the "actual sin" of the first human couple and, in turn, causing all our own acts themselves to be "actual sin." With the latter, we "inherit" guilt by which we are separated from God until it is removed by baptism; with the former, we incur our own guilt, which, after baptism, needs to be confessed and repented, lest it finally separate us from God.

The insistence on holding these two definitions together has several practical consequences. To define sin as "actual" is to stress that it most basically is "against God." Whatever its further ramifications may be, sin is a theological notion defined theocentrically and cannot simply be interchanged without remainder with psychological, sociological, or cosmological notions. Further, to define sin as "actual" is to stress our own responsibility for sin. Sin is conscious and deliberate violation of God's will. Whatever "original sin" implies, sin is not finally a fate before which we are helpless and without responsibility.

However, to leave it at that opens the door to individualistic and moralistic pictures of sin. If sin is violation of God's will, then it is a problem solely between each individual person and God. Furthermore, if each of us is responsible for doing it, each of us could cease doing it by "trying harder" (and then what we need is more willpower, not a crucifixion).

To define sin as "original" serves to block both of these inferences. Our actual sins follow from a corrupted state of our wills from which we cannot extricate ourselves by heroic moral and spiritual struggles. Further, our sharing in this corruption is a function of the solidarity of the human family and is not simply the sum total of our individual decisions; sin is a socially shared problem and not isolated individuals' problem with God.

However, to define sin as "original" is to see sin, if we may use the distinction, in social but not in societal terms. The state of sin may be an intersubjective state shared because of the solidarity of the human family throughout all time, but that "solidarity" has not been understood

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in terms of the "public" realm of actual societies' arrangements of social power. Hence, the internal logic of this doctrine of sin has tended toward a conservative stand on issues in the public realm. The doctrine has been easily used to support the view that however unjust status quo power arrangements may be, injustice is a consequence of sin. Remediation of injustice does not contribute to healing sin, and the elimination of injustice is strictly contingent on the prior elimination of sin. Therefore, those concerned about sin had best leave well enough alone in the public realm.

This entire doctrine of sin rests on a particular formulation of the basic gist of the Christian message. It is justified by a construal of biblical stories that synthesizes and harmonizes them into a single narrative history having three temporally successive moments: First, in love, God created humankind as part of a good world of finite creatures. Then, when some creatures sinned against God, the world as a whole was corrupted. At the right time, the same God, in love, took the initiative to save the fallen world by way of the election of a particular people, among whom God became incarnate and among whom the incarnate one was then crucified and raised in order to restore finite creatures to wholeness.

The "health-disease-healing" plot-structure of this narrative dictates that the conceptually basic doctrine is the doctrine of creation. Just as the doctrine of sin will set the categories in which redemption will have to be discussed (you can't describe the cure except in terms of the specifics of the disease), so the doctrine of creation will set the terms in which sin will have to be discussed (you can't describe a disease except in terms provided by an account of the healthy state of the ill organism). Thus, the conceptual home of the traditional doctrine of sin is a doctrine of creation, not a doctrine of God, even though sin must be defined in a theocentric way. This is not to say that this doctrine of sin is deduced from a doctrine of creation, but only that the doctrine of creation dictates the conceptual scheme used by the doctrine of sin and lays down some rules about what can and cannot be said consistently in a doctrine of sin.

Housing a doctrine of sin in the larger context of a doctrine of creation allows the doctrine of sin to stress several themes with particular emphasis. Above all, it leads to drawing a sharp line between finitude and sin. The contingency, limitations, and fragility that constitute our finitude are not themselves sin, are not the consequences of sin, and do not fate us to sin. Human creatures, precisely in their finitude and not as escape from it, are both free and knowing and, therewith, changeable in their actions and vulnerable to their consequences. Finitude is precisely what God creates, and it is "good."

The converse is that finite creatures are constituted as the type of creatures they are by a relation of absolute dependence on God. The type of creature one is will determine the sort of acts of which one is

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capable; act follows from being, not the other way around. For free and knowing creatures like us, this entails a relation of absolute accountability to God. This grounds a second major stress in the traditional doctrine of sin: Sin incurs "objective" guilt, that is, guilt as an objective status one, in fact, occupies before God, not guilt as a mode of subjectivity, a type of consciousness, or a feeling. It is also this larger context in a doctrine of creation that allows the traditional doctrine of sin the further theme that sin is best understood as both act and state. As absolutely answerable to God, human creatures' free and knowing violation of God's will is "actual sin." As absolutely dependent on God for being, human creatures are the same type of creature, sharing the same nature. If one of the consequences of actual sin (say, by Adam and Eve) is a corruption of human nature, then this corruption is "original sin." All who share in human nature will share in the corruption, and, since act follows from being, all who share in the corruption of human nature will commit actual sin.

The difficult intellectual task in this traditional doctrine of sin is to relate each of the two definitions of sin (as "actual" and as "original") to the other-in the context of a doctrine of creation-as a check on the other definition's possible religiously unacceptable implications (moralism, individualism, determinism), without falling into incoherence. This requires a dialectical skill with which not all preachers, educators, and thinkers have been equally gifted. The critics (the theological "liberals" regarding this topic), of course, have argued that it is an inherently impossible task.

II

The first trajectory along which the traditional, broadly Augustinian doctrine of sin migrated led from creation to theological anthropology as the systematic "home" of the doctrine. "Sin" names a condition of human subjects in which they are estranged from themselves, others, and God; a doctrine of sin describes that condition. Its central themes are familiar. The categories to be used in discussing sin and the rules governing what can and cannot be said are provided not by a doctrine of creation but by an analysis of what a subject is. To be a subject is not a gift given but a task to be achieved. What one is "given" are, on one side, a definite and limiting location (call it "finitude") and, on the other, capacities to transcend and transform creatively any and every given location (call it "openness" to transcendence). These are but the possibilities of becoming an actual subject. The task is so to take charge of yourself that you actualize yourself by holding these two in proper balance in all of your other projects. Your acts of self-relating constitute your actual being rather than (as in the traditional doctrine of sin) following from your being. If you fail to keep the two in balanced tension, so that in your life you seek creatively to transcend the given as though you were not rooted in it or, conversely, so that you simply identify yourself with some given status quo as though you in no

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way transcended it, you begin progressively to become less and less a subject. What must be said theologically is that the self-relations that constitute you as a subject can only actually be done in the context of a faith relationship with God. One is actualized as a subject in faith alone. To attempt to do it on one's own amounts to works righteousness; it leads to an inevitable dissolution of the self.

Accordingly, sin may be seen as both "actual" and "original." However, since your actual being follows from your acts of self-relating rather than your acts following from the actual being given you by God's creative act, the two senses of sin cannot be so easily distinguished. The act that counts as actual sin is strictly limited to the "act" of idolatry, that is, trusting something other than God as one seeks to actualize one's subjecthood. So, too, whereas traditionally the notion of original sin had served both to give a genetic explanation of sin and a description of the state of sin, here only the descriptive power of the notion is retained. Given the internal logic of the doctrine of sin, the two changes need each other. Without the explanatory force of original sin, there is no check on the individualistic and moralistic tendencies of "actual sin." Moralism, in turn, entails works righteousness that proponents of this type of doctrine of sin say undercuts the core of the Christian message of grace. Hence "actual sin" must be limited to the act of idolatry.

This doctrine of sin is funded by the same set of biblical stories of creation and fall, but differently construed and differently interrelated. Now, they are read as myths expressive of different aspects of a single universal human experience. It is an experience of ourselves as so deeply self-contradictory that we are well on the way to self-dissolution. Creation stories express our consciousness that "what" we truly are is finite and is normative for how we ought actually to be. Accordingly, a doctrine of creation describes not a creaturely cosmos in regard to its actuality but human subjectivity in regard to its possibility, that is, what the features are of subjectivity that make it possible for us to be actual and to be self-contradictory in our actuality. For their part, fall and sin stories express our consciousness that the concrete ways in which we actually live, the "hows" of our lives, are contradictory to "what" we truly are. Accordingly, a doctrine of sin describes that contradiction and what is needed to avoid it. In order adequately to express the one, complex experience of self-contradiction, the two sets of stories must not be held together as two moments in a single temporal sequence, but rather held together as though they were concurrent narratives of the same event (the "event" of me), each interpreted by reference to the other. The corresponding doctrines of creation and of sin must be held together in the same way in the context of a theological anthropology. One consequence of this is that "finitude" and "sin" are so closely tied together that they may seem to be two descriptions of the same reality looked at in two

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different respects. In that case, the "goodness" of finite reality, so central to the traditional doctrine of sin, seems to be in question.

Clearly, this was the basic pattern of the doctrine of sin that dominated mid-century American Protestant theology and, in various modalities, is still very influential. Despite deep and important theological differences on other matters, Reinhold Niebuhr² and Paul Tillich³ shared the basic structure of this doctrine of sin. They share it, moreover, with many successor "correlationist" theologians and with so influential a Roman Catholic theologian as Karl Rahner.⁴ That this pattern of thought about sin can still be employed with great power is shown by Edward Farley in his remarkable recent book Good and Evil.⁵

Developing a doctrine of sin in the context of this theological anthropology has important practical consequences. By integrating the faith relationship and, indeed, justification by faith so deeply into the very core of a doctrine of sin, it has tended to shift emphasis in pastoral leadership away from programs and structures of worship focused on sanctification and the formation of Christian identity and toward mission on behalf of the neighbor in the public realm and the wider culture shared with the neighbor. Of course, this does not follow of necessity; Karl Rahner's extensive attention to sanctification and spiritual formation alone would be evidence of that. However, especially in American Protestant circles, its systematic undercutting of any theological support for justification by works, pious works in particular, clearly has tended to feed suspicion of expenditures of energy to make us more "holy." So too, it opens up space for a less politically conservative stance in two ways: by rejecting the explanatory force of "original sin," thus making the injustice of the status quo look less like implacable fate; and by systematically undercutting all forms of self-righteousness and moralism, which makes the possibility of incurring guilt through action in the public realm seem less ultimately threatening. On the other hand, as feminist theologians especially have pointed out, its stress on sin as willful idolatry tends to provide a better pastoral diagnostic of men's experience of sin than it does for the experience of women who have been socialized into more self-abnegating patterns of action. Finally, it leads to interpretations of guilt as a subjective state rather than an objective status before God (as it is in the traditional doctrine of sin). Indeed, for all of its insistence that it is housed in an ontology of subjecthood, not in a psychology of

² Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941).
³ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
⁴ Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).
⁵ Edward Farley, Good and Evil (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991). Judging by the way he deals with the topic of sin in his Anthropology in Theological Perspective (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), I am inclined to place Wolfhart Pannenberg in this group even though the systematically central place of eschatology in his theological project would otherwise suggest that he belongs in the next "type."

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the dynamics of guilty feelings, this doctrine of sin has-ironically-proved open to a psychologizing of sin. It has readily undergone more or less humanistic psychological "translations" that allow easy conflation of theologically informed pastoral care with secular psychological counseling.

III

A second trajectory along which the traditional doctrine of sin has migrated leads from creation to redemption as its larger doctrinal context. With the traditional doctrine of sin, it construes biblical stories as one long narrative, but argues (with extensive debts to Gerhard von Rad⁶) that it is, from first to last, a history of God's redemptive acts, of which creation is simply the first among many, culminating in the event of Christ. Indeed, it is God's redemptive action that "binds" time into a single history, giving it meaning. Hence no topic in theology, from creation to sin, can be properly understood except in terms provided by an understanding of redemption. What the biblical narratives show is that God's redemptive acts always occur in the midst of the "material" realities of history that generate political conflicts, often occur through radical political change, and are aimed at the relief of those oppressed by unjust power arrangements. In short, on this view redemption is best understood as liberation.

There is room for a variety of characterizations of God's liberating act. Their differences from one another turn in large part on the different ways in which they see time bound by God's redemptive act. As is well known, figures like Gustavo Gutierrez⁷ and James Cone⁸ take the Exodus story to be the paradigmatic redemptive act, as though God keeps repeating the same basic pattern of action in a series of redemptive acts in successive moments of history. Johannes Metz,⁹ on the other hand, locates God's redemptive act specifically in the past moment of the life and crucifixion of Jesus, which impinges redemptively on subsequent historical moments through our "subversive memory" of his suffering, a memory subversive of every oppressive power arrangement. By contrast, Jürgen Moltmann¹⁰ locates God's redemptive act in the eschaton, a future event proleptically present in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, the reality of God's Kingdom of peace and justice that is now genuinely actual but not yet fully actualized, related to the present not as a moment growing out of the present ("futuram") but as something radically new impinging on the present from the future ("adventus").

In the context of such doctrines of redemption, sin is understood basically to be unjust societal self-contradiction, in contrast to sin as

⁶ Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
⁷ Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973).
⁸ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970).
⁹ Johannes Metz, Faith in History and Society (New York: Seabury Press, 1980).
¹⁰ Jurgen Moltmann, The Theology of Hope (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1967); The Church in the Power of the Spirit (New York: Harper & Row, 1977),

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the self-contradictory state of human subjects. Hence sin is at once socially structural (the functional equivalent of "original sin" as corruption) and individual (the functional equivalent of "actual sin" as personal act). It is structural in that it is an inherited and shared arrangement of power in society that oppresses some, putting them in conflict with others, in which we continue to be complicit whether as oppressed or oppressing. It is individual in so far as, knowing of God's act to liberate us all from it, we nonetheless willfully refuse to oppose it. Human movements to liberate the oppressed do not bring in God's liberation; only God does that. Redemption as the enactment of God's plan for the world may not be conflated with progressive social action as the enactment of some critical social theory. But refusal to respond in trust to God's act of liberation with our own inadequate efforts to liberate the oppressed and to correct unjust structural arrangements of power is against God and is sin.

The practical consequences of this understanding of sin for a Christian mission of social action are as well known as they are controversial. It is clear in the writings of theologians representative of this view, such as Gutierrez and Metz, that a theological definition of sin in terms of social conflict no more logically entails a theological justification for the use of violence to liberate the oppressed than does a definition of sin as self-conflict entail a justification of self-violence to heal the self. It is equally clear that this doctrine of sin is nonetheless open to being developed (distorted?) in that direction. What is less often noted is the practical consequences of this doctrine of sin for Christian formation. It requires the cultivation of capacities to perceive and identify sin not only as distortions of one's interiority in specific concrete circumstances but also as structurally at work in specific concrete circumstances in one's society; and it requires cultivation of capacities to engage in specific efforts at liberation without oppressing others (one's enemies) by demonizing them and denying their human dignity.

IV

A third trajectory along which the doctrine of sin has migrated leads it from creation to christology as its doctrinal home. The type of christology in view here agrees with a liberationist doctrine of sin that no theological topic can be understood except in the context of a doctrine of redemption. However this view, represented monumentally by Karl Barth¹¹ and his current progeny, holds that redemption has already been accomplished in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. This rests on yet another construal of biblical stories that sees them as a narrative identity-description of Jesus as God incarnate; the "history" of God's redemptive acts is simply a story telling who Jesus is. What it tells us is that, as the incarnation of God, Jesus is in himself

¹¹ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, Pts. 1-3 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956,1956,1961).

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quite concretely the actualization of God's primordial decision to be in the closest covenant relation with reality that is other than God and that all reality that is not God, including ourselves, is dependent on that decision for its very being. To say that such a christology is the larger context for a doctrine of sin is to agree with the liberationist theologies that redemption is the necessary context within which properly to understand sin. It is also to go beyond that to claim that, as the incarnation of God, Jesus is the ontological basis of our being creatures who, as it turns out, are sinful.

Formulated in this context, a doctrine of sin defines sin not by reference to a structure of creation that obtains whether or not sin or redemption occur, nor by reference to the structure of subjectivity, nor by reference to the manner in which a history of salvation takes place, but solely by reference to the presence of the risen incarnate Son of God. Sin is defined as willful disrelatedness to the risen Lord present here and now.

Putting it this way has odd conceptual consequences. In one way, sin is ontologically impossible. We would not exist to be "dis-related" to the risen Lord were we not already related to him by his own gracious decision to include us in the community of his covenant love. Sin only takes place within the context of the covenant relationship with the Son of God and neither breaks off nor neutralizes that relationship. So sin is, at most, a deep delusion we have about ourselves: that we are and can be outside relation to Jesus Christ. Yet, in another way, sin clearly obtains. People do have this delusion. And it has terrible consequences. Not only does it render them incapable of knowing God. It sets them on a kind of slippery slide toward nothingness. Understood in this context, sin is taken very seriously. And yet, given Jesus' resurrection and the realization in it of God's eschatological purposes, neither the ignorance nor the drift toward nothingness can have any ultimacy, for now nothing can separate us from God's covenant love.

This conceptual oddity has correlates in the practical consequences of this doctrine of sin. This comes out in the affective tone fostered by this doctrine of sin. On the one hand, it gravely underscores the objective reality and radically disabling consequences of sin. In sin, we are literally depraved. The affective tone appropriate to this state of affairs is dark, marked by helplessness and terror. Left at that, this doctrine of sin should generate markedly penitential styles of congregational life, modes of piety and strategies of pastoral care that, at best, would cultivate poor self-images and low self-esteem. However, the basic point of the theological strategy of this doctrine of sin is firmly to bracket all of that, without denying its truth in the slightest, in the larger context of the affirmation that sin in all its objectivity has just as objectively been overcome decisively in the resurrection of Jesus. The affective tone appropriate to this state of affairs is sheer joy, a cheerful hilaritas as one goes about life in the every day. The strategy of this

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doctrine of sin is designed to generate patterns of worship, preaching, pastoral care, piety, and mission in the world that instantiate this affective tone in the daily round, not by denying the grave reality of sin but precisely by stressing it as something real but overcome.

The sense that the concept of sin has faded out of the week in, week out discourse of Christian communities does not lack for supporting evidence, of course. This essay has argued that the concept is an important part of a wide variety of types of formal theology, although sometimes under aliases. It may be that otherwise influential formal theologies do not much influence church folk to talk specifically about sin because these doctrines of sin have become too complexly dialectical to be helpful guides to what to say when we pray, preach, give pastoral care, and passionately engage our society. It may be that liturgical movements stressing the centrality in the gospel of Jesus' resurrection and protesting the one-sidedly penitential shape of traditional worship contributes to a muting of sin-talk, Or perhaps what's being sensed is not so much a disuse of the concept of sin as it is an abandonment of the concept of divine wrath, for, if there is no need to talk about the wrath of God, then there is not much need to talk about the sin that incurs the wrath.