165 - God Be Merciful to Me, a Miscalculator

God Be Merciful to Me, a Miscalculator
By Thomas G. Long

If I could I'd confess
Good and loud, nice and slow
Get this load off my chest
Yes, but how, Lord-I don't know.
What I say I don't feel
What I feel I don't show
What I show isn't real
What is real, Lord, I don't know
No, no, no-I don't know....
("Trope: I Don't Know," Mass, Leonard Bernstein)

The word "sin" has experienced a serious deflation in the working vocabulary of our culture. Once upon a time, "sin" was a majestic word, a necessary word, a word without which we could not describe our humanness, a word that, in a single syllable, could both climb giddily to the heights of human folly and crawl into the fearsome depths of human ruination.

In the last few decades, however, the meaning of sin has diminished and deteriorated; sin has been demoted. Unemployed in serious conversation, it works the carnival circuit, like Jimmy Swaggart's drippy TV confession. Or it is forced to walk the streets on the seamy side of town, left to describe only those most obvious, and in some way, most superficial frailties of the flesh. In this glossary, drug users sin, but not urban planners. Peep show provocateurs sin, but not artistic Hollywood directors. In a recent essay on the phenomenon of the American shopping mall, Witold Rybczynski said this about the gargantuan Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota:

In its own middle-American way, ... it ... aspires to be a "place for fun in your life," as its theme song puts it. This ambition is evident in the nightclub area.... Although the stores in the mall close at 10:00 p.m., the nightclubs ... stay open until 1:00 a.m. Combine neon, nighttime, loud music, alcohol, and cruising singles, and the resulting atmosphere (it reminded me of a sort of midwestern Times Square-there was a whiff, but only a whiff, of sin) is not what one usually associates with shopping malls.1

¹ Witold Rybczynski, "The New Downtowns," The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 271, No. 5 (May, 1993), p. 104.

166 - God Be Merciful to Me, a Miscalculator

A whiff, but only a whiff, of sin? Not what one usually associates with shopping malls? Anyone who can walk down the central concourse of a 4.2 million-square-foot consumer temple at 10:30 p.m., following its aimless corridors past one be-mirrored boutique after another, their baubles safely buttoned up for the night, and detect only a faint aroma of decay wafting out of Joe's Sports Bar and Comedy Club, either has a stuffy nose or-more likely-is operating with a shrunken definition of sin.

Mostly, however, the word "sin" has all but disappeared from the landscape, covered over by the kudzu of bureaucratic speech and the seemingly more pertinent and positive language of therapy. "There was a time when we were afraid of being caught doing something sinful in front of our ministers, observes a character in one of Peter DeVries' short stories. "Now we are afraid of being caught doing something immature in front of our therapists." Prayers of confession are banished from liturgies as "too dreary"; sermons on sin are avoided in the name of preserving self-esteem. No one at a government hearing confesses sin. Miscalculations, perhaps. Errors in judgment, maybe. Inconsistencies at this point in time, surely. But sin? Never.

So, what is lost? What suffers when the language of sin fades from the serious discourse of a society? One could argue, of course, that nothing is lost; in fact, something is gained. "Sin" has always been a political word, as well as a theological one, and its definition has characteristically been controlled by those in power. So, "sin" is "uppityness" or "pride," or whatever those who aren't in power do to protest their powerlessness. The word "sin," goes the argument, is ever defined in the dictionary of the dominant group and easily becomes a weapon in their hands. Thus, we can just as well do without it.

While acknowledging that grievous sins have been done to-and in the name of-the word "sin", the fact is that the theological concept of sin is considerable treasure. If we squander it or lose it, we also lose the capacity to speak with accuracy and depth of our humanity. Like other key theological terms, "sin" cannot be replaced with any other, more accessible, term. "Immorality" is too tame, too attached to the human will and social codes. "Estrangement and alienation," existentialist favorites, are too small, too focused upon the individual. "Evil" paints too broadly and lacks personal bite, while concepts like "codependent" and "psychopathic" are located on a single floor of the human mansion.

No other word gathers up in a single stitch the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, the moral, the ecological, the social, the cosmological, and the theological character of the brokenness of human life and of all of creation. To be able to use the word "sin" is to be able to speak with honesty about who we are with and to each other. Because it places us on common ground, it is the soil of compassion, forgiveness, and hope. An anthropology that lacks a vigorous doctrine of sin is

167 - God Be Merciful to Me, a Miscalculator

headed for constant disillusionment, chronic and bitter disappointment, and ever deepening spirals of rage over the inability and unwillingness of human beings to act responsibly.

In an essay, Walker Percy describes the despair created by an emphasis upon a false confidence in human moral capacity. He presents a man who commutes into the city every day on the train, passing the time by reading self-help books, books on "mental hygiene." He reads there of the virtues of inclusiveness, openness, emotional maturity, belongingness, appropriate assertiveness, and other personal moral strengths-all presented as not only desirable, but also attainable, within the grasp of human potential. Of course, any attempt actually to grasp them would be a recipe for constant failure and moral bewilderment over the inability to obtain what the self-help books proclaim to be our rightful legacy. "There will emerge," observes Percy, "far more faithfully than I could portray him, the candidate for suicide."²

Some months ago a startling advertisement appeared in the New York Times. It was placed there by another newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, and it consisted of a reprint of one the Journal's more provocative editorials, followed by the even more provocative tag line: "When was the last time you had a good conversation about sin?"³ The attached editorial recounted the roll call of moral dilemmas appearing daily on television-the Clarence Thomas hearings, the William Kennedy Smith affair, high-school sex, an addicted culture, and on and on-and then commented:

Sin isn't something that many people, including most churches, have spent much time talking about or worrying about through the years of the [cultural and sexual] revolution. But we will say this for sin; it at least offered a frame of reference for personal behavior. When the frame was dismantled, guilt wasn't the only thing that fell away; we also lost the guidewire of personal responsibility.

...Everyone was left on his or her own. It now appears that many wrecked people could have used a road map.

... Ministers and priests gave way (voluntarily) to clinics and counselors. Instead of giving your kid a dressing-down, you now give him (or her) a condom. The ministers of the therapeutic say the dressing-down is useless because the kids don't know what you're talking about anyway. By now, they may be right.⁴

It is clear, of course, that the editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, even in calling for a recovery of the word "sin," betrays his or her lack of awareness of the true size of that concept. But, at least there is this surprising call for someone to step forward and to teach the culture how to confess, once again, its sin. "When was the last

² Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 85.
³ The New York Times, January 8, 1992.
⁴ Ibid.

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time" the Joumal asks, "you had a good conversation about sin?" Indeed, this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY is, in essence, an answer to that call. On the theory that, when theologians get laryngitis, the culture gets amnesia, the authors included in this issue have been asked to clear their theological throats and to engage in a good conversation about "sin."