Sin and Us

Today is an exciting day because we have two posts, both of which are late. The Reconciliation one is from last Wednesday (10/7) and this one is from Monday (10/12). We had no school and thus no chapel on the Friday in between. Sorry we were slow.

Peter:
Edee Schultz spoke today, and I like her style in that she’s funny and sincere all at the same time. Her topic was sin, and she had various things to say about it, the one which I appreciated most being her reference to the sin nature perverting good rather than being an entity unto itself. Personally I subscribe to the Dantesque idea that “The human impulse to love pleasing things is seen as the root of all virtue, but it can also be 'perverted, weakened, or misdirected to become the root of all sin'" (Brown, 1998).

That being said, there were a lot of questions that I had which went unanswered. The use of ‘Christianese’ pervaded Edee’s talk, which does more to convolute what she was saying than clarify. For instance, she used prolifically the term ‘sin nature’ and ‘predisposition to sin’ but failed to clarify where this nature comes from, or why this ‘predisposition’ exists. Why is it a predisposition and not a disposition? What is this ‘sin nature’ entity thing? Albeit they may be more peripheral to her point, but valid questions nonetheless. Recently I’ve been questioning the validity of the ‘dualistic nature.’ Mostly because it comes as difficult to understand. Can one have a ‘sin nature’ and a ‘God-given good nature’ as implied by Edee? That would seem to subscribe to a more Taoistic understanding of good and evil, almost a debased Manichean understanding, but how else would you understand good and evil? On that note, how does evil relate to sin? Are they equivalent? Identical? And if there is a two-nature system, how similar are the natures? If evil is fissiparous as advanced by Edee, why wouldn’t good be fissiparous as well? And if Edee states that ‘evildoing isn’t as big a problem as ‘evilbeing,’ why do we try to deal with evildoing? I question the validity of even drawing the distinction… but I don’t know. Can you separate evildoing with evilbeing? There are just so many questions I could ask, but I’ll stop for now, suffice it to say that Edee got screwed with a very difficult topic in sin, and all things considered she made her point, but a point buried in a host of unanswered questions.

Brown, J., (1998). The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Kent: Kent State University Press.

Tim:
First of all…Peter, did you use APA formatting for that reference? It looks suspiciously like it. I really feel that nothing quite lives up to the Chicago style, and it makes me sad inside when I see anything else. I apologize for my rant. I also apologize for my excessive use of analogies, stories and metaphors in the following paragraphs. If you’ve had many discussions with me know this is just how I talk. I realize they only go so far, but I just love them so!

Unlike Peter, I really didn’t have so many questions, so I will try to quickly say a couple that are both a response to Peter’s musings and are things that I wanted to talk about anyway. First, I think we say “sin nature” because it’s the easiest way most people have found to express an extremely difficult concept. If we effectively defined terms, it would consume the whole time period allotted for the message. Related to that, I think when we say we have a “sin nature” and a “good nature,” we are using “nature” differently. It is only a subtle difference, to be sure, but I think it’s important. I think of it something like a genetic disease, say hemophilia. I may be born a hemophiliac. It is part of my nature as me. But at the same time, it is not my nature as a human being. As a human, I was not intended or created to have this condition. Yet, it plays out in my life as if it were. So I guess I think of us having both natures, but one is primal and one is (or was, through Adam) acquired.

Similarly, I think there is a subtle but important distinction between evildoing and “evil being.” The problem is it’s something I don’t know how to express. So I will just tell a story. When I was little, I heard about the “bad” things or sins that weren’t allowed. Like any curious little guy, I grew up and proceeded to do them. During that, I did not question their badness – it was quite apparent in my life. But I knew there was something more about it that I had missed. And it was that it wasn’t the sinful actions that were the major problem. Those were only symptoms of my much more profound failure to live up to the person I was made to be – a person created in God’s image. Now, if I read this several years ago, I would say “duh.” But now, it’s somehow profoundly real. I hesitate to say that I don’t care about people’s sinful actions, but in a sense, I don’t. I care about the causes and effects of those actions in their souls and in their relationships. Similar little story: as a Christian guy, I grew up with the feeling that one of my primary tasks in life was to fight against lust. But as I have grown and seen other guys involved in groups and reading books about how to do this and never making any progress, something just seemed off. And eventually I realized that it’s not about the lust. It’s about filling my heart with God’s love for those around me so that respect, not lust, will win out. It’s about seeing the world through God’s eyes. It’s about crowding out the “evilbeing.” Again, I realize anyone who reads this will be like “well yeah, of course.” I would have for my whole life, but it was never real until I experienced it. But, sadly, it is really impossible to express. I have tried my best…

Finally, I want to go back to what she said about sin perverting good. This is something that I have been thinking about in recent years and something that has become very real. She mentioned something about people being a certain way before they were Christians and still being that way afterwards, and that that is not bad. We often think that we have to change the way we are. I struggled with this for many years. I don’t know how old I was when I realized that my gifts didn’t lie in the areas of, say, encouraging people, asking good questions, engaging in deep relationship. If ever I was supposed to comfort someone, I found myself full of compassion, but staring blankly, wondering what to do. The things I was good at were things like analyzing an argument and picking it apart, or writing, or in picking up on certain subtle distinctions or connections (but definitely not being able to articulate them). I also noticed that the things I was good at often resulted in me hurting people’s feelings, frustrating those around me, or at the very least, immense frustration of my own. None of these seemed like things that were compatible with the Kingdom. I felt that my gifts and God’s work were at odds.

One day, I realized that I really enjoyed being a history major and I could do fairly well at it because I was naturally good at things like picking apart arguments, writing, and making connections. Then it dawned on me that those gifts in my life had been twisted and used in ways that were contrary to God’s work, but that in fact, I could turn around and use them for him. The best part is, as I learn to do that, I have to fight myself less and less. Being able to use my gifts for good gives me immense joy. As that happened, I was able to open myself up for God to develop in me those areas in which I’m less gifted. And, while I’m still at about a 1.5 on a scale of 1-10 in those areas, I’m finally growing in them. As I grow into myself and God uses my gifts, he also begins to fulfill my heart's deepest desires. All this is to say that what she said really resonated with me and I think she’s totally right. And in my opinion, one of the most effective ways Satan keeps us down is by turning our deepest (good) desires and gifts around on us and having them lead us astray. In fact, those desires and gifts that cause us to sin are the same ones through which we can do God’s will and bring about the restoration of this world.

I did a quick Google search on Ps. 37:4, which is the “desires of your heart” verse and got a whole bunch of results about how when you grow in Christ he will change the desires of your heart. There were also pages about how to discover the desires of your heart – things like the desire to love and be loved, or to feel special, or whatever similar things there are in our hearts. We don’t have to change them, we don’t have to discover them. They’re already there and we’re already very familiar with them. When we turn ourselves over to God for his use, he will fulfill those desires.

I apologize for my preaching. I just really liked this message and I wish I could actually express it.

“Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” – Psalm 37:4