220 - A Peculiarly Christian Account of Sin

A Peculiarly Christian Account of Sin
By William H. Willimon

"The Church's notion of sin, like that of Israel before it, is peculiar. It is derived, not from speculation about the universal or general state of humanity, but rather from a peculiar, quite specific account of what God is up to in the world. "at God is up to is named as covenant, Torah, or, for Christians, Jesus. If we attempt to begin in Genesis, with Adam and Eve and their alleged fall,' we will be mistaken, as Niebuhr was, in thinking of sin as some innate, indelible glitch in human nature."

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire....
Winter kept us warm,
covering Earth in forgetful snow....
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter....
--T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, I, 1922

In Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head¹, an urbane, self-possessed intellectual named Martin Lynch-Gibbon tells us about his life with a series of wives and lovers. At the beginning of the novel, it is fairly obvious that Gibbon is superior intellectually to all of these women, whom he uses for both his pleasure and the inflation of his ego. "In my own marriage I early established myself as the one who took rather than gave."² From his lofty perch, Lynch-Gibbon tells us about his mistress's abortion. He says of that event, "For myself, I got off with an extraordinary ease."³ Then we follow his story of various and sundry affairs, collusions, and trysts. Lynch-Gibbon is so wisely detached from the lives of his lovers, so witty and so astute about women. Then, things begin to unravel. His mistress, Georgie, attempts suicide. He finds another of his mistresses in bed with his best friend,

William H. Willimon, a frequent contributor to THEOLOGY TODAY, is Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University. He has written many books, including a commentary, Acts (1988), and Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized (1992).

¹ Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head (New York: The Viking Press, 1961).
² Ibid., p. 14.
³ Ibid., p. 13.

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her brother. Then his wife, Antonia, delivers the coup de grace. All these years, while he thought he was being unfaithful to her, she was carrying on a raging affair with his brother. The woman he considered too cold, too unimaginative for real sin, has shown Lynch-Gibbon what a simple, unimaginative fool he has been. Like a head severed from its body (my interpretation of the title), Lynch-Gibbon neither feels nor knows anything except that, by the end of the novel, he knows at last that he has never known.

A Severed Head is a very Christian novel, not only in its subject matter, the story of a proud, conceited person being cast down into childlike contrition but also in its form. The denouement occurs when Lynch-Gibbon's account of his life is assaulted by a very different story, told by the women, which reveals the stupidity, the self-deception of the account he has always given of himself.

Sin can be known only when our stories are exposed by more truthful stories.

Many sensitive and thoughtful people are aware of a general disease and disorder in human existence. This generalized awareness has little to do with the Christian notion of sin. Sin is more than taboo, dread, or shame. The Septuagint's rendering of "sin" by hamartia, or "missing the mark," only compounds the confusion. When Christians say "sin," they are saying more than the universal cultural phenomenon of human beings living as they ought not.

Christian sin results not from our unhappiness with the limits of human existence and our inappropriate response to that unhappiness (Niebuhr).⁴ Rather, Christian sin is derivative of and dependent upon what Christians know about God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Reinhold Niebuhr, citing Herbert Butterfield, is well known for his remark that "the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine that Christians have." Even those who do not know that Jesus Christ is Lord, know sin.

Niebuhr was wrong. As Barth says, only Christians sin. That is, only Christians have inculcated the insights and the sets of practices that make sin comprehensible. Christians learn to sin, not by beginning with allegedly universal observations about the "human condition" but, rather, by beginning with a story of redemption. Only later do we

⁴ One of the purposes of Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Scribner's, 1964) was "to relate the biblical and distinctively Christian conception of sin as pride and self-love to the observable behavior of men." Niebuhr's discussion of pride and sensuality is instructive, particularly as we recall the David and Bathsheba narrative. "Sensuality represents an effort to escape from the freedom and the infinite possibilities of spirit becoming lost in the detailed processes, activities and interests of existence.... in unlimited devotion to limited values" (I, P. 185). Sensuality is "the self's undue identification with and devotion to particular impulses and desires within the self" (I, P. 228). Feminists have rightly criticized Niebuhr's view of sin and its preoccupation with "freedom" and "infinite possibilities" as culture-bound, perhaps gender-determined rather than biblically derived. See particularly Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington: University Press of America, 1980), pp. 62-72.

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move to an account of sin. Therefore, a favorite prophetic mode of speaking about Israel's sin was narratively, as stories of national adultery and fornication, in order to indicate that, in our sin, something very intimate has been violated in our story with God. Indeed, sin might be called a clash of narratives, a necessary byproduct of the redemption of our modern "heap of broken images" of ourselves (Eliot) with a story that is true.

I

Thus, we turn to a favorite political adultery narrative, the story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11:1-12:31. In this episode from the life of David, we shall see demonstrated how Christians are taught to sin by learning a truthful account of ourselves:

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, "This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, "I am pregnant."

This is the beginning of the story that Walter Brueggemann calls "the pivotal turning point in the narrative plot of the books of Samuel.... [D]elicate, subtle art, ...this text ... has the power to address us. If we face this text at all, we are soon invited behind all the critical, scholarly questions to face the harder questions of human desire and human power-desire with all its delight, power with all its potential for death."⁵

At the beginning of the story of David's sin, the narrative is sparse, tight, direct. As Robert Alter has noted, this story "bumps" the listener, intrudes into an otherwise heroic saga of King David, tells us more about David, in a more direct manner, than we, or King David, might have wished.⁶

Now, David is too old to be heroic. He leaves the spring campaign to younger underlings and spends long afternoons napping on his couch. Yet when he sees Bathsheba, he is still able to muster some decisiveness. David acts quickly upon his desires. He saw. He sent. He took. He lay. There is no long, tortured wrestling with conscience. King David is at the height of his autonomy and royal power. No brooding or

⁵ First and Second Samuel [Interpretation Commentaries] (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), p. 272. I owe to Brueggemann's commentary many of the literary and exegetical insights I apply to this passage from 2 Samuel. I was also helped by the excellent discussion of this passage in Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Sin and Judgment in the Prophets (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), pp. 81-85 and Gwilym H. Jones, The Nathan Narratives (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), pp. 93-94.
⁶ The Art of Biblical Narrative, (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 119 ff.

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caution for him. There is only action. It is the act, not the thought nor the inner confusion or doubts of David which occupy the narrator. Sin is in the action.

At last, the woman speaks. Her simple words "I am pregnant" shatter the king's world. Royal strategies attempt to salvage the situation, but already control is slipping through David's fingers. At first he appears decisive, hatching a plan to extricate himself by duping poor, dumb Uriah. Yet, the reader knows David is being jerked around by forces beyond even the king's power to manage:⁷

So David sent word to Joab, "Send me Uriah the Hittite." ...David invited him to eat and drink in his presence and made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.

In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, "Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die." ...When the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she made lamentation for him. When the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son.

End of story. We are perhaps somewhat troubled that David is not as great a king as we were led to believe in the early chapters of 2 Samuel. However, people in power do not always play by our rules. Sometimes, a king must do what needs to be done in order to maintain power, order, national stability. Politics is not for those with weak stomachs.

II

All might have ended well for David were it not for the insertion of another narrative into the rather conventional story of royal power and its methods. "But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord ..." (v. 27). David is certainly not displeased. Yet, there remains one more story to be told before we know the whole story:

But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord, and the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him, and said to him, "There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him." Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, "As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die;

⁷ Barth expresses contempt for the decidedly non-heroic character of David's sin. "If only he had been caught up in an evil principle and programme! If only he had gone astray and shown his fallibility in a significant entanglement! But ... it is only a trivial intrigue, however savage and evil in its outcome.... It is all below his usual level, and petty and repulsive," Church Dogmatics, IV/2, pp. 464-467.

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he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity."

Brueggemann skillfully compares verse 25, where David reassures Joab, "Do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now another..." (it's a tough world; sometimes bad things happen to good people) to verse 27, in which David is pleased, but Yahweh is not.

At this verse occurs a collision of two narratives: the story of how power is gained, used, and inevitably abused in the "real world" and a second narrative about Yahweh's counter plans for the world.⁸

David's story told him that he was acting in secret, indeed that he was the only actor of consequence in the story. Then, out of nowhere, with no introduction or narrative preparation, appears the prophet Nathan. The prophetic intruder now does all the talking, and his talk is exclusively in the narrative mode.

In a scant four verses, Nathan entraps the king. In Nathan's parable, the rich man is sketched in a flat, nondetailed way. He is rich and has everything he wants. Period. The poor man receives much more detailed, more interesting description. In David's story, the king is the recipient of the greatest narrative interest, while little nobodies like Uriah are barely sketched. In the prophet's story, the tables are turned and our attentions are drawn toward the poor man and his little lamb. In the prophetic counter-narrative, we notice people and economic circumstances that official, royal narratives teach us to ignore.

The rich man, being powerful, decisive, has the freedom to act. Like King David, he sees, he takes, he consumes. The parable is more than prophetic strategy, an artistic means of ensnaring the king in his own blind arrogance. Rather, in juxtaposing the two stories, the king's story with the prophet's, 2 Samuel 11-12 portrays a clash of narratives, a collision of the royal story with Yahweh's story.

The significance of this narrative collision is made explicit when Nathan forsakes narrative and moves into direct, confrontive speech. In the prophet's words, we learn how little prophetic parables like Nathan's are essential for Israel's self-discernment. David's "I have sinned" arises not from his realization of some self-evident moral law (Kant) nor from a possibly neurotic exercise in self-scrutiny. "I have sinned" here arises out of a clash of narratives, a narratively induced

⁸ Of this pivot point in the narrative Brueggemann says, "...[R]oyal perceptions of reality are not congruent with Yahweh's perception (Cf. Prov. 16:2). The royal seductions of power and security have skewed the moral vision of Israel. The king may act. The king may kill. The king may be self-satisfied. The king, however, is not capable of revising moral reality. The king may imagine he has escaped the hard, non-negotiable reality of the old Torah tradition. The king may imagine he is morally autonomous and subject to no one. In the end, however, the end of the narrative, there is Yahweh with another moral vision. The narrative leaves no doubt that the eyes of Yahweh will outsee the eyes of David. David may not see clearly, blinded as he is by fear, lust, and power, but that does not change the moral reality to which David must answer" (First and Second Samuel, p. 279).

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awareness of a horrible disjuncture between David's personal account of his life as king and the prophet's account of David's life as gift.

Gift is the main topic laid on the table when it is Yahweh's turn to speak. The speech begins with rehearsal of past graciousness. As Barth noted, grace precedes repentance. Everything is dominated by the verb "give." All that David has-his displacement of Saul, his domestic bliss-all has come as gift. What David thought of as his autonomous achievement is, in reality, gift. Yahweh swaggers, accuses, asserts: "I anointed you ...; I rescued you ...; I gave you ...; and furthermore, "I would have added as much more":

Nathan said to David, "You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master's house, and your master's wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun. For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.

David has moved from mere smiting to taking and killing, thus violating the commandments. But, as Yahweh's speech shows, the thing that enrages Yahweh is how David has abused the gifts and the trust of Yahweh. The story Yahweh tells is a far cry from the royal narrative of David. As Brueggemann says, "David has been seduced by the royal view; the king now is shown to be answerable to the covenantal prophetic reality...."⁹ Note, also, that there is no attempt here to sort out the personal from the political, the subjective from the social, no "moral man" as a good individual apart from "immoral society" (Niebuhr) with its systemic corruption. The sin is of one piece, so much so that the story sees David's lust as somehow tied to his practice of politics, his use of Bathsheba as somehow linked to his use of Israel. Something there is about sex and politics that makes them go together. It is of the nature of narrative to frustrate neatly categorized, reductionistic accounts of reality:

David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord." Nathan said to David, "Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die." Then Nathan went to his house.

Yet, the collision of narratives is not closed. These stories are meant to continue. Having been caught red-handed, trapped, one might think this is the end for David. Two things impress us about the

⁹ Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel, p. 281.

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continuing story: David's swift, outright confession, "I have sinned," and the prophet's swift, outright pronouncement, "Now the Lord has put away your sin." The collision of stories is meant to evoke this twofold, covenant response. David's response is evidence of his submission, not just to the Decalogue but to the narrative, the covenant narrative. Just as we were prepared to write off David as a moral failure, the prophet's counter narrative has evoked a new David (or is it the old David, in the best sense of the designation?) who is yet able to submit, to admit to the coherence and dominance of Yahweh's account of things. Our story reads "autonomy." Yahweh's story says covenant."

So Barth interprets David's sin:

He had done what he should not and could not do as the elect of Yahweh. He had contradicted at every point himself, his election and calling, and therefore Yahweh.... He, the bearer of the promise, is also a man of this kind. This is what is revealed with such remarkable frankness in the story of 2 Sam. 11-12. David is now playing the role and aping the style and falling to the level of the petty melek, or sultan, or despot of other peoples. David is like all other men.¹⁰

In short, David's sin is revealed, by the prophet's story, to be that of living as if he had no story, as if he were not already spoken for by Yahweh.¹¹

Yet, thank God, Yahweh's story has the power to evoke that which it demands. David is able to name his sin, having been given the narrative means rightly to discern what is going on in his life. David's response is not evoked principally by Nathan's "you are the man" but, rather, by Yahweh's "I gave." Having been seduced by a false story of royal power, David courageously resubmits to Yahweh's truthful account of the way things stand between us and a God who manages to be both truthful and gracious, a God whose truthfulness is grace.

There is still a high price to pay; there remain consequences. David's family shall pay. Much death, much grief come after David's repentance. Yahweh's graciousness does not mean that our actions are without consequences. There is a high cost to doing business with stories other than truthful ones. And yet, despite the seriousness of David's sin, the story continues, the story told because a gracious God is willing to intrude, to assert, and, ultimately, to forgive. David's continued story is there, not as some "impossible ideal" to be heroically lived despite a renewed awareness of his finitude (Niebuhr). David goes on as a man who knows his sin because he knows his forgiveness. Although the child dies, David is spared, the family is continued in the birth of Solomon. So, this story of sin and forgiveness

¹⁰ Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, p. 467.
¹¹ Luther sees David's sin as a denial of providence, a breach of relationship with God. He warns, "If God would withdraw his protective hand you would become blind, or an adulterer and murderer like David, you would fall down and break your leg and drown" (Predigten des Jahres 1531, in WA 34, II, 237), pp. 3-4.

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can be seen as a subtle, interesting way of introducing the narrative of Solomon. The glowing narrative of Solomon's rise to power must be constructed upon this tragic account of David's sin.¹² Israel specialized in the art of telling royal stories as tragedy.

III

Niebuhr attempted to make sin an ontological category. Sin is more precisely a noetic event, a matter of discerning reality in a truthful way, the only way we have of discerning reality, through a story. Sin is the ability to discern what is actually going on in us and in the world, rather than something inherent within human nature.

By making sin an ontological characteristic, Niebuhr asserted that everyone sins. No. Sin is rebellion against Torah, the failure to live by God's story. So to a remarkable degree, sin is an event after the story. Thus, Barth could assert only Christians sin. Only Christians have a story that makes our actions comprehensible not as minor slipups, mistakes of judgment, or even as our inappropriate response to the facts of the human condition (Niebuhr) but as sin, as our determined effort to live our lives as if God were not the author of our lives.

The church's notion of sin, like that of Israel's before it, is peculiar. It is derived, not from speculation about the universal or general state of humanity, but rather from a peculiar, quite specific account of what God is up to in the world. What God is up to is named as covenant, Torah, or, for Christians, Jesus. If we attempt to begin in Genesis, with Adam and Eve and their alleged "fall," we will be mistaken, as Niebuhr was, in thinking of sin as some innate, indelible glitch in human nature. We must start with Exodus rather than Genesis, with Sinai rather than the Garden of Eden, with Calvary.¹³ Only by getting the story straight, God's story of redemption, are we able to understand our sin with appropriate seriousness and without despair because only then will we know of a God who manages to be both gracious and truthful. Our human situation is not that we are all dressed up with a will to power and transcendence with nowhere to go but failure. Our situation is that we view our lives through a "heap of broken images," never getting an accurate picture of ourselves. Through the "lens" of the story of Jesus we are able to see ourselves truthfully.

I, therefore, agree with James McClendon when he says that, in order to reform the church's received doctrine of sin,

It will be necessary to make a starting point, not in Adam's (or Eve's!) alleged act of sin on behalf of innocent babes and faithful believers born an aeon later, but rather in the full faithfulness of Jesus of Nazareth, who

¹² See Gwilym H. Jones, The Nathan Narratives, pp. 93-117. As Jones notes, the story of David and Nathan introduces "theological themes to a narrative that was remarkably non-theological." The Deuteronomistic hand is evident.
¹³ The rabbis do not read Adam and Eve as a "fall." Christians have tended to read Genesis that way because we read Genesis christologically, that is "backwards," from Good Friday and Easter back to Adam and Eve. Redemption precedes the "fall."

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resisted the temptation that confronted him all the way to his cross, who overcame the principalities and the powers of his day at the price of his life, and who, risen from the dead, summoned followers to abandon every sin and to follow in good faith the pioneer of their salvation. A doctrine of sin linked to this central narrative ... [will not only show] the dark shadow sin casts ... [but it will also] hold up this divine faithfulness as the measure of every life, and it must confess that whatever falls short of, denies, or contradicts Christ's faithfulness is sin.¹⁴

¹⁴ James Wm. McClendon, Jr., "Sin," in A New Handbook of Christian Theology, edited by D. W. Musser and J. L. Price (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), pp. 446-447.