Children's Craft

At night, the quiet house is filled with the marks of the new world—of the redeemed creation seeping through. The Kingdom is visible in items rearranged and reassembled by small hands throughout the day. You can step into my lounge room in the evening and see it in cereal boxes repurposed as little buildings, in papers covered with strange magical markings. It is in the horse head made out of butcher’s paper and in the toothpaste box labelled “keys”, their substances altered by the innocent alchemy of a child’s mind. The outworking of a secret known only to the young: “the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” 

The truth of the world glows here, in the dark: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”

I go about my house silently to gather up all these prophetic markers of the new world. I place them discreetly in the recycling bin.

Politics, society, and institutions: a theological outline

OK, polemics aside for a moment, the outline below is an attempt to state my point of view as clearly and concisely as I can, organised around some key doctrinal themes:

Creation: The human person is created in the image and likeness of God after the pattern of Christ, the human prototype. By nature the human being stretches beyond itself in love towards God and the neighbour. Human nature was created not yet in perfection but with the capacity to attain the eschatological perfection of a society ordered wholly by love.

Fall: Only the height of our createdness can measure of the depth of our fall. Created with a capacity to love God, the fallen human being projects transcendent longing on to worldly objects. When this is done individually it leads to spiritual enslavement. When it is done collectively – when a whole social order projects transcendent longing on to some common object – then the monsters of idolatry appear on the stage of world history, and uncontrollable enslaving powers are unleashed.

Sin: The essential form of sin, therefore, is idolatry; and the fruit of idolatry is slavery. The first is a perversion of our capacity to love God; the second is a perversion of our capacity to love the neighbour.

Society: In every social order, one can glimpse something of the majestic createdness and abysmal fallenness of human nature. The problem of any given social order lies not in specific structural and institutional arrangements. The problem lies in the inscrutable depths of the disordered human heart. That is why the noblest revolutionary turns overnight into the bloodiest tyrant. It is why the most equitable social and economic arrangements are so quickly exploited by a mysterious and insatiable greed. It is why social orders prove mysteriously insusceptible to rational planning and management.

Politics: The sole rationale for politics is original sin. The principal aim of political order is not to produce justice but to restrain injustice; not to cultivate the spirit of the law but to enforce the rule of law; not to create love but to set limits to self-interest; not to bring peace but to constrain the inevitable tendencies of the human heart towards violence and war. Politics cannot bring Christ to earth. It is enough if it succeeds in holding Antichrist at bay. But while the rationale for politics is original sin, the measure of politics is eschatology. The perfect eschatological society stands as a criterion and criticism of every social order, stripping it of its pretensions to transcendence and thereby freeing it to be simply what it is: a tragic necessity for a fallen world. 

Institutions: The ordering of society through institutions reflects a real though limited good. Judged by the measure of the perfect eschatological society, institutions can be relieved of their pretensions to transcendence and can aspire to better (though always limited) approximations of truth, goodness, beauty, love, and peace – though these subtle approximations are ordinarily possible only where a society has first been adequately restrained by political authority and the rule of law.

Church: The church is not one social institution alongside others, even though the church inevitably expresses its spiritual life through institutional structures. The church is the society of Christ's followers dispersed throughout the world, permeating every institution and every stratum of social order. Christ's followers participate fully in the social and institutional life of a society, but they do so in the mode of repentance and hope. They repent as representatives of the whole social order; and their hope is likewise a representative act on behalf of the whole society. In this way the church functions not as one of the world's institutions but as a leavening of all institutions within a given social order. By pursuing the imitation of Christ through the twofold discipline of love of God and love of neighbour, Christ's followers give persistent witness not to any alternative or improved political order but to something before and beyond all political order: human sociality ordered by love. The existence of such a witness leads in some circumstances to martyrdom, in other circumstances to reforms or modest improvements within a social order. The consequences differ but the witness is the same.

Eschatology: Christian hope is directed not towards a catastrophic end of social life, but towards the revelation of a perfect sociality ordered by love. The infinite beauty of God allows for unceasing growth in love. In the life of the world to come, our growth in love will continue unceasingly, and human society will flourish under the order of love. On that day – but not till then! – the necessity of social ordering through politics, law, and institutions will be lifted.

God: The secret of human history is the patience of God. All God's dealings with humankind are marked by a patient love of growth and life and time. Not coercively but with supreme courtesy, God draws the human partner out beyond itself into loving union with God. This is an eschatological relationship, since the depths of divine love are without limit; but it is eschatology adapted to the capacities of human nature. Our nature is not violently altered from the outside but is, in Christ, creatively healed, renewed, and glorified from within. Strictly speaking, it is our love that is reordered, not our nature. The glorified human being – the human being lovingly united to God and to the neighbour – gives rise to a glorified (because fully human) sociality. A fully human society is the glory of God.

Handing them over to Satan: two cautionary tales

Theologically I am committed to a pretty deep pessimism about human nature. Original sin and all that. The belief that history is not headed anywhere and does not mean anything; that things do not generally improve; that the real problems of life are intractable and almost completely resistant to our flimsy toys of reason, education, therapy, and whatnot; that the only thing really worth hoping for is the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Temperamentally, though, I am an outrageous optimist. I won't be lying if I tell you that I have probably felt optimistic about every human being I ever met. I once knew a mad and rather menacing individual who told me with a scary gleam in his eye that he had been investigated for several murders – and all I could think was that I liked his roguish sense of humour. I was once mugged by a ruthless fellow who threatened me and took a fifty dollar bill right out of my hand – and the whole time I just kept thinking to myself: he is probably doing it to buy his child a birthday present. I have shaken hands with professors of French philosophy, and have been quite willing to believe that even they are not altogether devoid of some residual spark of human goodness.

I say this only to make it perfectly clear that I am not easily angered or disillusioned with my fellow man. He does not disappoint me, because I expect so little of human nature to begin with; he does not disgust me, because I assume the best of him and am always willing to give him another chance. Nobody is beyond redemption, and nobody is above the need for it. My boundless confidence in these two truths makes me, as a rule, quite agreeable.

And yet. There is a chilling scene in the New Testament where St Paul casually mentions that he has handed a couple of his associates over to Satan (1 Tim 1.20). He instructs the Corinthians to hand a certain troublesome parishioner over to Satan too (1 Cor 5.5). That's at least three people who were entrusted to Satan's diabolical care. It's a serious business to deliver a fellow human being into the welcoming arms of the Prince of Darkness. I myself have done it on occasion – on two occasions, to be precise – and it's no laughing matter, believe me. It kind of enervates the spirit, even though when the moment strikes there's no avoiding it.

The first time I ever had to do it was some years ago. A Christian minister, an acquaintance of mine, was preaching a sermon against family values. I cannot recall exactly what he disliked about families, but the gist of it was that he admired them about as much as kidney stones. I guess the family was one of those things that had to be squeezed out before this preacher's Marxiose-revolutionist-liberationary dreams could all come true. To explain the problem with families, the preacher embarked on a very entertaining satirical description of a certain conservative middle-class suburb. He was rather funny, pouring scorn on all the spiritual emptiness and hypocrisy of suburban life. He pronounced the name of the suburb with a kind of sneer that got funnier every time he did it. He had the congregation rolling, positively LOLing, with merriment. He persuaded everybody that this particular suburb was a spectacle worthy of all imaginable ridicule.

The only trouble, reader, was that it was my suburb. I take my shoes off there every night. My dog takes his walks there. My children serve their school detentions there. Some of my dearest neighbours live there. They knock on my door when they need to borrow milk or eggs. They feed the fish when we are away. To the preacher it looked like a funny old-fashioned conservative-voting suburb, but to me it is a community. To me it is people, and I'm pretty fond of them too. If the preacher had spent fifteen hilarious minutes making fun of me, I would have laughed with everyone else and forgotten all about it. But he made fun of my neighbourhood. 

I knew what I had to do. Silently I turned the light of my countenance away from him. Solemnly I consigned him to a spiritual darkness. I handed him over to Satan, hoping that one day he would repent and I would be able to look at him once more.

The second time it happened was even worse. I cannot call the incident to mind without feeling deeply shaken. Even now I can scarcely bring myself to speak of it. It all began innocently enough. A conversation with a learned gentleman about the theatre. Not just any learned gentleman either but a real scholar, an author of books, and not just any books either, but big ones. We exchanged pleasantries about the history of theatre. We chatted about the Greeks. We were enjoying ourselves. Inevitably the conversation turned to Shakespeare. I professed a particular devotion to The Tempest, explaining that I admire the way that play lays bare the essential machinery of the theatre. It is like the Eiffel Tower, I said, a building that exposes to plain view all the engineering that other buildings try to conceal. The Tempest is the quintessential play about plays; it is not so much a play as the blueprint of all drama, the pure Platonic form of Shakespearean comedy, history, and tragedy.

Believe me, reader, I had more to say on this subject of the The Tempest. I was only getting started. Comparisons to eternal forms are only the beginning. You should hear me when I really get going. But at exactly this moment the learned gentleman did a curious thing. He wrinkled his nose. He kind of sniffed in a sniffy sort of way, if you know what I mean. He said, with an air of infinite detachment and world-weariness, "Shakespeare? Ah but have you read the Arabic dramatists? Not to mention the German dramatists. And how much, tell me, how much do you know about the Chinese theatre? Not just the contemporary stuff but the history of it, the history I say. Ah, Chinese drama! Now there's something worth knowing about! You see, my dear fellow," he continued, regarding me with the profoundest boredom in the world, "you see, Shakespeare can't possibly mean anything until you've read everything else. You need to see him in his proper context. Otherwise there's no point saying you love Shakespeare. It's nothing but British imperialism, that's what it is. It's nothing more than –" he cleared his throat in a decisive, disgusted sort of way – "ignorant prejudice."

Very carefully I located the parts of myself from the floor and gingerly began piecing them back together. I wanted to get to the door as quickly as possible but I also had to tread very carefully in case the earth opened up underneath us. I remember the time, as a boy, when I had first experimented with swearing. I whispered the four-letter words reverentially and waited for lightning to strike or for angels to appear in the sky or for the world to collapse in on itself. I felt the same way now, more or less. A fellow human being, made in God's own image, had just described the love of Shakespeare as – it pains me to have to repeat the words – imperialism; ignorance; prejudice.

Now personally I don't mind being insulted. I am as imperial and as ignorant and as prejudicial as the next person. Insult me as much as you like, I deserve every syllable! But my learned interlocutor had not wanted to insult me; that was clear. It was against Shakespeare – which is to say, against Humanity – that his scorn was directed.

If there had been dust on my feet I would have shaken it off. I wanted nothing more to do with this man. I had nothing else to say to him. I had no good news to tell him. He wanted to see Shakespeare "in context": well, let him keep his context, and I will keep Shakespeare! He wanted to peer down his aristocratic nose at the entire human race: well, let him keep his higher vantage point, but I will stick with the human race! Though I loved this person, though I had always respected him, though I admired his learning in the non-Shakespearean departments, I resolved that I would never speak to him again. I would do nothing else for him except to pray for his soul. In a nutshell, I handed him over to Satan so that he might learn not to blaspheme.

Now I know what the moralists out there are thinking. That I should stop handing people over to Satan. That I should forgive and forget. Shake hands and make a fresh start and all that. Leave Beelzebub out of it. Hear me, you moralisers! Listen to me! If you insult me, slander me, criticise my haircut and spit in my eye, I will forgive you quick as a flash. If you pounce on me out of the shadows and take my fifty dollar bill, I will never give it a second thought. If you tell me you might possibly have murdered a few people I will still go on believing the best of you. But don't come to me with malicious words about my neighbourhood! Don't bring me your "contexts" for understanding Shakespeare! For when you do these things, you set yourself above the common human lot. And then you force my hand: for I am all on the side of humanity. If the gods themselves took your side, I would still be unmoved. I would stand right here – with Shakespeare; with humanity; with my neighbours – against all gods.

Social implications of the doctrine of original sin

I've been teaching the doctrine of original sin in my theological anthropology class this semester. Here's a table I created to try to explain the social implications of the doctrine of original sin. Obviously this isn't meant to be a nuanced scholarly presentation, just a rough and ready tool for teaching purposes. The table presents the doctrine of original sin as the foundation of a Christian understanding of society, as opposed to the two generic modern "heresies" of gnosticism and romanticism.

	Gnosticism	Romanticism	Christianity
Nature is…	Split into good and evil	Pure and innocent	Created yet fallen
Human nature is…	Perfectible	Already perfect	Not perfectible
Salvation is…	Victory of the good side of society over the evil side	The spontaneous flourishing of human nature	Never fully present until the last judgment
The problem with society is…	The presence of evil forces or evil structures that need to be eradicated	Laws, institutions, and social constraints that need to be abolished or transcended	The fallenness of every aspect of society. All relationships, groups, institutions, and structures are ruled by a fallen nature.
Education is…	About enlisting children in a pre-defined struggle against evil. Education is a form of propaganda.	A threat to the child’s spontaneous freedom and creativity. Education is the root of all evil.	Necessary to form children in virtue, and to help them manage their own fallen tendencies
Sex should be…	Either rejected (as evil) or worshipped (as a god)	Allowed to flourish spontaneously without any social constraints. Repression vs emancipation.	Managed and disciplined within covenantal relationships which are protected by various laws and customs
National and ethnic identity should be…	Protected and purified at any cost, as a bulwark against external evils	Transcended and obliterated. There is no ethnicity in the state of nature.	Respected in spite of its imperfections, and valued for the sake of higher goods
The role of government is…	To eradicate evil and to make the world good; to pursue absolute justice in order to usher in a utopia	Invalid, since it interferes with the state of nature. Grass-roots movements are a better path to justice.	To seek approximate justice; to provide law and order so that sinful tendencies are restrained
The purpose of life is…	To be true to your vision of a better world.	To be true to yourself.	To be true to something beyond this world.

James-ism: the doctrine of the Fall

When I came into Jamie's room he was staring at his hand in disgust, saying: "Eeew. I just spat in my hand – on purpose!"

There's enough material there for a whole Dostoevsky character.

The street preacher

At five o'clock in Sydney the shops and high-rises empty their contents on to the streets, people blinking in surprise at the sunlight, everyone either rushing to get someplace else or lingering to avoid it. On George Street I passed a woman with a spray can, doing portraits on big torn sheets of butcher paper. Someone handed me an ad for a Chinese restaurant or a topless bar, I can’t remember which. I got coffee and stopped a while to watch a boy playing a decrepit homemade guitar, his fingers conjuring aching Spanish music, as if by magic, from the acoustic stump. I stayed for two songs, then a guy in a suit called out a request, some pop song, and you could see the boy was humiliated but he played it anyway, I could hear the sad half-hearted improvisations as I walked away. At the corner a preacher thundered about judgment and Sodom and Gomorrah and the weight of sin that drags us down and drowns us. A born-again biker, picture perfect with his beer gut and angry black goatee and leather Jesus jacket, he was talking about damnation and repentance when his beady black eyes saw me. He saw me peering out at him from the perishing faces of his beleaguered congregation. He saw me drowning in Sydney’s sea of wickedness and threw me a lifeline, a hideous gospel plea, have you sinned? have you been born again? Nervously I averted my eyes, pushed my hands into my pockets, hiding my sins from him there like the stones in Virginia Woolf’s overcoat, heavy and precious and inexplicable.

Why do I shrink from the street preacher? Why do I hide from his piercing eyes and scuttle away and try to lose his voice in the consoling anonymous clamour of the street? As much as anyone else that day on George Street, I have to hope he’s wrong, that his implacable rage against the city is not the rage of God, that the face of God is more than blood and thunder and holy indignation.

But what if he’s right? I was losing myself in the crowd, but his words echoed behind me, something about horror and the Bible and salvation. What if he’s right, and salvation means rescue from a bottomless pit of divine hatred? Could I accept redemption on those terms, could anyone? Could I be born again? Or should I ask the preacher to lead me in a prayer of unredemption, ask him please don’t save me, please let me stay in hell with everybody else? If Sydney is Sodom and Gomorrah, wouldn’t it be better to stay and be swept away than to flee for the lonely mountains? Could I explain all this to the preacher? Would God accept my testimony if I chose to bear witness in hell instead of heaven, if I loved those God hates more than I love God?

The preacher wants my sins. He craves them like a wild and hungry thing, famished with righteousness. He would ask me to confess; he would suck the marrow from the bone. I heard his last words, if you die tonight, before his voice was swallowed up and lost in the city’s godless clamour. I went down the steps to the Town Hall station. Beside me on the platform two teenagers were making out. The girl’s ear was studded with silver, her body pushed up against the handrail. A man with a briefcase was talking into his phone, sweaty and earnest, probably a wife or mistress. I watched the rubbish on the tracks and waited. I wondered if the preacher had been a prophet or messiah, the last hard truth at the world's end. I hope I’ll never see him again. Sometimes it’s better to be damned and ruined than left naked without a name. Sometimes your whole life is just one dull sin after another, and you can’t honestly repent of all that, not even if you wanted to. I buried my hands in my pockets, counting out my sins one by one like pathetic rosary beads as the man on the phone said no fucking way and the girl with the earrings moaned and the train rattled into the station, drowning everything at last in a grey monotonous thunder.

Repenting about repenting

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

In Matthew’s Greek the word is metanoeite (3:2). The traditional translation is “repent”. The GNB paraphrases: “Turn away from your sins.” Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message cuts to the chase: “Change your life” (today we might say, “Get a life!”).

But let’s pause for a moment and take a step back. The Greek means, literally, “change your mind” – and that’s where I want to start this morning, with where we are, with the fact that, actually, not only are we not very good at changing our minds, but indeed changing your mind is considered a weakness, and in public life a grave weakness, indeed a form of political suicide. There is even a new term for it, “flip-flopping”, though Margaret Thatcher put it best when she said, “The Lady is not for turning.” Isn’t that what politicians fear the most, the accusation of the U-turn?

Of course politicians do change their minds. But you never admit to changing your mind because, it is feared, to admit to it would make you look irresolute and weak. Which is immoral, because it is hypocritical, but even if it weren’t a deceit, it would still be an idiocy. Integrity is one thing, inflexibility quite another. Inflexibility is just plain dumb. Where would civilisation itself be without what are called “paradigm shifts”, radical, fundamental changes in the way that we think about the world? In a splendid editorial for the Independent, Boyd Tonkin once observed that “Changes of mind lie at the core of almost every breakthrough in science, art and thought. From Copernicus to Einstein, Leonardo to Picasso, James Joyce to Bob Dylan, lasting innovations rest on a rupture with the principles of the past… Ludwig Wittgenstein created one revolution in philosophy with his [first major work the] Tractatus. Later he decided it was fundamentally misconceived and created another [revolution] with the Philosophical Investigations. And if Alan Turing had never revised his view about the practicality of his highly abstract research on ‘computable numbers’, then the machine on which [I wrote this sermon] would not exist.”

Only a fool makes up his mind about something and, in principle, never changes it. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes was once accused of altering his views on monetary policy. He confronted the charge head-on: “When the facts change,” he declared, “I change my mind. What, sir, do you do?”

So that’s the first thing: repentance involves changing your mind, thinking differently about things. Why? Because you see something you hadn’t seen before. What did John the Baptist see? That the rupture of all ruptures – the kingdom of God! – is seismically shifting the plates of the universe.

This transformation of our imaginations – this seeing, by faith, the transformation of the world into the kingdom – is crucial, but because the Bible talks about repentance in connection with sin, we are talking about a moral transformation as well. Cue the classic conversion story: Once I was a thug, or a thief, or a drug-dealer – in short, I was a sinner – but now I’ve got religion, I’ve been born again, I’ve been saved, and I don’t do those terrible things anymore. Isn’t that the conventional understanding of “repentance”? And then, of course, most of us, very conveniently, are let off the hook, because most of us don’t do those terrible things, and indeed the people who did do those terrible things are also let off the hook too as long as they don't return to their wicked ways.

This is a big mistake. And the mistake is this: we presume that we know what sin is, what sins are, and that we can check our lives against the list and see how much, or how little, repenting we’ve got to do. My claim this morning, however, is this: we’ve got to re-think what sin is, sins are. To put it bluntly, we’ve got to change our minds about just what it is we need to change our minds about, we’ve got to repent about repenting.

I am referring to the mistaken idea that sin is basically about individual wrongdoing and guilt. It is not. At least it is not in the sense in which the Bible understands it. In biblical thought sin transcends the personal and includes the communal and the national, and it is fundamentally about injustice. This is quite clear from the fact that Jesus links repentance with the Jubilee, with Good News to the poor and oppressed, with human well-being and flourishing. And it is equally clear from the fact that it is precisely those who run the religious establishment, who live ostensibly righteous lives, who obey the law and keep the traditions, who thank God that they are not like the criminals and whores who are ruining the moral fabric of Israel – that it is precisely these good folk who reject the Lord’s call to repentance because, after all, what do they have to repent about?

Am I saying that Jesus calls people to accept responsibility not only for their own actions but also for the actions of others, for humanity’s acts, indeed for history’s acts? That is exactly what I am saying. On Question Time three years ago, at the time we were commemorating the ending of the slave trade in Britain, the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey criticised the present Archbishop Rowan Williams for his public apology for the church’s complicity in the buying and selling of black human flesh. That was then, he said, and now is now, that was them and this is us. Er, no, Lord Carey. For not only do white people continue to benefit today from the evils of slavery, and not only are there a lot of racists about, stoking up fear and hatred over immigration, but racism remains socially systemic. And I – I myself – as Archbishop Rowan says, “I am, willy-nilly, involved in [this] ‘structural violence’, in economic, political, religious and private systems of relationship which diminish the other”; and, moreover, “My involvement in [this] violence is most destructive when least self-aware.”

“In each the sin of all, in all the sin of each” (Schleiermacher) – that is the fact of the matter. And to deny this fact, to fail to compute it, to change our mind about changing our mind, to repent about repenting – it is quite morally corrosive. For where will it end? If I do not take responsibility for the sins of humanity, will I not also refuse to take responsibility for the sins of my nation? And if I do not take responsibility for the sins of my nation, will I not also refuse to take responsibility for the sins of my church? And then of my community? And then of my family? And then, thus isolated from the entire social network, past and present, what is left of the “me” for whom I am responsible? Thus Dietrich Bonhoeffer, offered a prestigious academic post in New York on the eve of World War II, declined it, to return to Germany, to face the coming catastrophe, for he knew that the price of acting responsibly as a Christian included solidarity with his fellow countrymen in their nation’s sin and guilt.

And what was Bonhoeffer doing – what are we all called to do – but to model ourselves on Jesus of Nazareth? At the very outset of his ministry, even before – indeed as a precondition of – his preaching repentance (Matthew 4:17), what does Jesus do but submit to John’s baptism of – what? – of repentance. And why? Why else but to show his solidarity with sinners by becoming (as Martin Luther powerfully put it) peccator pessimus, the chief of sinners.

And so, finally, paradoxically, this solidarity of sin is hopeful. For as Karl Barth said: “Precisely when we recognise that we are sinners do we perceive that we are brothers [and sisters].” For as I acknowledge my complicity in the world’s wrongs, I become part of what has been called the “solidarity of the shaken” (Jan Patocka), those who recognise the delusion of innocence, and those who refuse to scapegoat in order to maintain it; and, further, as I become sensitive to the suffering we inflict on each other, I open myself to a fellowship of compassion. Moreover, I find that I can make choices, saying Yes to this and No to that, and act in ways that make a difference: I can contribute to micro-transformations in personal relationships, and I can engage in public dissent and resistance, and thus in signs and parables of grace and goodness, I can bear witness to the coming of the kingdom of shalom.

In the very first of his revolutionary Ninety-Five Theses, Luther wrote: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said ‘Repent’, willed that the whole life of believers should be one of repentance.” Repenting about repenting too. Because – look! – the kingdom of God is breaking in, now.

Rebecca DeYoung: Glittering vices: a new look at the seven deadly sins

A guest-review by Don Needham (a Sydney friend who comments here as “Fat”)

As some of you may know I have been studying at UTC to become a Minister’s Wife. I have had batches of scones turn out perfect and some became rock cakes but I’m told scones can be perverse like that. Aside from that I have been privileged to sit in on some of the lectures and attend the courses as my wife studies, and I have the belief that heaven will be like that place – you have passed the weather and are into deep and meaningful conversation about God with almost everyone you meet.

I thought I would share with you some insights from Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung's new book, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Brazos 2009).

The idea dates back at least as far as the Greek philosophers. Aristotle wrote that vices and virtues are those aspects of our character which have become second nature to us. The four cardinal virtues were mentioned in the book of Wisdom 8:7, probably written as guidance to the Jews in exile some 300 years before Christ (about the same time that the Greek idea of the four virtues was prominent).

Christian thinkers have long considered that the work of Christianity is to continually die to the bad and rise to the good, and so the virtues and vices were incorporated into Christian teaching. Augustine followed on Paul's concept of love covering all the virtues, so that the Greek ideal of “self perfection” became the work of the grace of God. The desert fathers refined the lists and came up with eight demons which beset the desert hermit: gluttony, impurity (lust), avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (later called sloth), vainglory and pride.

Eventually we come to Thomas Aquinas, who looked deeply into the list of vices and virtues almost as we have it today: seven vices (why seven? because seven was a right rounded whole and religious number). And pride, rather than being the eighth, is now placed at the root of all sin. Here is his list: vainglory, envy, sloth, avarice, wrath, lust and gluttony.

Each of these vices had an opposite virtue. By way of example, Gluttony would have as its opposite not anorexia but nurture, looking after our body by eating sensibly. In one extreme, we might fast so much that we are weakened and unable to perform our duties as part of the community. The problem is that such fasting becomes an end in itself instead of the prayer and contemplation it is supposed to engender. And of course the opposite extreme is gluttony, where we live for food and nothing else. Both these extremes are deadly in two ways: first, we can die from lack of food and we also can die from eating too much; and second, by putting our habits and the feeding of them ahead of God, we lose sight of his saving grace and we lose sight of the fact that it is he who furnishes the table.

So in addition to gluttony, we have:

Vainglory. Image is everything. We love to be the beautiful people. Don't the ads and the magazines promise all the wonders of recognition and conquest if we use this toothpaste or put that deodorant in our armpits? The right shampoo, and the opposite sex will flock to sniff the ground we walk on. Thomas Aquinas says, “It seems to belong to a natural appetite that one wish one's goodness to be known.”

As the early church fathers pointed out, it seems “even – or perhaps especially – when we have virtue and good character, we are vulnerable to vainglory, for it haunts us most when our virtue goes incognito.” And vainglory strives to be seen to be superior even if we have to fake it. Tragically, we distance ourselves from others and from God even as we win the accolades, because the masks we wear become walls. “It is difficult to escape vainglory,” says Evagrius, “for what you do to rid yourself of it becomes for you a new source of vainglory.”

Avarice. Avarice puts goods and chattels into #1. It is also rooted in pride because we come to think we no longer need God. We can stand on our own two feet . We say “my house, my car, my T-bone steak, my dog, my widescreen TV, my…” and we forget that it all comes from God.

Wrath. De Young writes: “Being angry is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.”

Lust. I'm thinking Tiger Woods at present, but the media are in an orgy of their own, loudly decrying his dalliances while engaged in their totally voyeuristic pursuit of “News”. Sex itself is not a sin and neither is it salvation. It’s like nitroglycerine: it can heal hearts or blow bridges up. And lust need not be consummated in sex to be lust – it shows a problem in the heart above the belt way before it’s a problem with the heat below it.

If lust has a corresponding virtue then it has to be wholeness – the joining together of two as one flesh in marriage.

Envy. “Of all the deadly sins, envy is no fun at all.” Envy and its ugly sisters, jealousy and covetousness, go further than greed. Instead of saying “I want one like that,” they say: “I want that one – I don't want you to have it.” It could be goods, or status, or a job, success, talent, skill, or even (if you remember your fairytales) something like beauty. Envy is always looking out for the competitor, looking sideways to see no one rises too far, looking upward to see that perfection is out of the question – just so as long as I'm better than you. Envy is the enemy of love.

Finally we come to Sloth. The one sin I knew least about, but if Thomas is right and vices and virtues are acquired through practice – well, it's the one I've been working on the most and I am the best at by far.

So in order to understand sloth, let’s ask: How can sloth be rooted in pride? OK, it’s one of those mornings when it has turned cool overnight. You wake up cold and you know there’s a spare blanket just over there – yet you lie freezing and awake for an hour till the alarm calls. It isn't that you’re too lazy to get the blanket. It's that you don't want to brave that shock of cold while you get the blanket – better the devil you know.

Here's another. A husband and wife have a minor tiff, so he goes to the workshop to use the power saw and she goes to the kitchen to bang pots and pans – let her stew he says; let him stew she says. Meanwhile in front of their comfy lounge their favourite programme slides by unwatched. Both too proud to say I'm sorry – wallowing in their own juices, they don't want that little pain of making amends.

This is the original meaning of sloth: not laziness, but a willful act. If you really look at it, some of the busiest people are the most slothful, because they fill their lives sawing wood without producing anything worthwhile. Their pride keeps them there.

These are the deadly sins – not because, taken to excess, they can kill you, but because they elevate other things above God. So I want to leave you with a few short questions:

• Has it really become cool to be evil?
• Was Gordon Gekko correct in Wall Street when he said “greed is good”?
• Are we really as bulletproof as we believe?
• Are you still banging those pots and pans?

Reading advice: sin and the powers

A quick request for some reading suggestions: one of my students this semester is taking a guided reading course on “sin and the powers” (his own chosen topic). To start with, I’ve got him reading some of the core 19th- and 20th-century texts on sin (e.g. Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Barth); then the next component will focus on more recent texts relating to sin, the powers, and ethics of freedom. Anyone want to offer their favourite reading recommendations on this topic?

(By the way, after all the great help I received, I’ve been meaning to post the course outlines for my current subjects on ecclesiology and pneumatology – sorry I haven’t done this yet, but I’ll try to get to it soon!)

Headwaters: poems by Rowan Williams

At last! I’ve been waiting eagerly for Rowan Williams’ new book of poems, and it’s finally here: Headwaters (Oxford: Perpetua Press, 2008), 72 pp. The book includes 25 collected poems, plus a sequence of sonnets responding to ten of Shakespeare’s plays, plus Williams’ striking translations of several Welsh and Russian poems. (It doesn’t seem to be available yet in the US, but it can be ordered direct from the publisher, or from Abebooks, or from Amazon.co.uk.)

I’ve only read through the collection once so far, but I can tell I’ll be spending a lot more time with these poems. Here’s one of my favourites – an astonishing poem entitled “Sin,” translated from the Welsh of D. Gwenallt Jones:

Take off the business suit, the old-school tie,
The gown, the cap, drop the reviews, awards,
Certificates, stand naked in your sty,
A little carnivore, clothed in dried turds.
The snot that slowly fills our passages
Seeps up from hollows where the dead beasts lie;
Dumb stamping dances spell our messages,
We only know what makes our arrows fly.
Lost in the wood, we sometimes glimpse the sky
Between the branches, and the words drop down
We cannot hear, the alien voices high
And hard, singing salvation, grace, life, dawn.
Like wolves, we lift our snouts: Blood, blood, we cry,
The blood that bought us so we need not die.

Homosexuality and the church: a meditation on the tragic (Part Two)

A guest-series by Ray S. Anderson

The Tragic and Human Sexuality

If love is intrinsically tragic because it offers possibilities of fulfillment to human desire, hopes and needs that can never be met in even the most perfect human relationship, then sexuality itself is intrinsically tragic. The sexual nature of humanity perhaps lies nearest to the core of the self in terms of human intimacy. This is why sexuality is such a profound and yet complicated – and yes, tragic – component of the structure of humanity.

Sexuality itself is tragic because it is a component of the very structure of humanity that is woven through with the tragic. We do not understand what it is to be a human person until we understand that. And we cannot understand the struggle to integrate unfulfilled, sometimes chaotic, and often self-defeating sexual experience into authentic human personhood until we understand that.

When a man in his late 40s tells me, “I always wanted to have children, but after getting married when I was 25 I discovered that my wife could not and would never be able to conceive a child. Yes, adoption was one possibility, but my dream of having a child of my own well never be realized.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

When a single woman in her late 50s tells me, “When I was in my 20s I thought for sure that I would be married. All of my friends found someone, I never did. I have lived all these years hoping for someone to love me in a special way. It never happened.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

When a homosexual person tells me, “I knew that I was homosexual from the time I was a teenager. I tried to deny it, but finally accepted it, and though it is against what the Bible teaches, I have someone to love me and to live in a relationship that I could never have otherwise.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

What each person in these situations has in common is an experience of the tragic as a component of their human experience. We must first understand that before considering the moral implications of their behavior. When Jesus confronted the woman at the well (John 4) he drew forth the truth that she had lived a life of promiscuity. “You have had several husbands and the man you are living with is not your husband.” Jesus perceived the tragic component of a woman’s life lived under these circumstances. The moral issue with regard to living with a man not her husband was never brought up. Jesus did not label her a sinner, but empowered her to confess that he was truly the Messiah sent from God. My point is that to label the sexual orientation and practice of a person as “sinful” fails to understand the tragic construct of that person’s life.

The Tragic and the Kingdom of God

Sin is not a condition that precedes grace. For until one is welcomed into the Kingdom of God through grace, the tragic only is a condition to be overcome, sometimes by religion, rather than by a relationship in which the tragic is brought under the promise of redemption. Until we each have discovered our own sin, always through grace, to be called a sinner by others is not only graceless, it is tragic. It breaks the common bond that makes us human. Saul of Tarsus would never have accepted the accusation that he was a sinner until he experienced the grace of God through his encounter with the risen Christ. Until the tragic nature of sin is revealed though grace, it lies untouched and unredeemed, hidden like a deadly virus that thrives on self-affirmation only to emerge in self-condemnation.

Jesus did not label persons whom he encountered as sinners, but rather offered them the power of his own person and inclusion in the Kingdom of God as an eschatological promise of redemption of the tragic. Looking over the crowd who followed him, he had compassion on them because “they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:7). Later that day he instructed his disciples to feed them and, as a result, more than 5,000 were fed. This “miraculous meal” was an eschatological sign and promise of redemption from the tragic. For a meal only lasts one day and holds back the tragic for a time; then hunger again rises up to remind humans that their existence is fragile and weak.

Redemption from sin begins with understanding, not with condemnation. Does this mean that sin is disregarded? Not at all. But then we should understand that we are bound to each other not only by virtue of the tragic, but also by sin. When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church with regard to sexual sin, he placed that particular sin in the same category as greed, worship of idols, and being abusive, a drunkard or a cheat (1 Cor 5:11). Paul only discovered that he was a sinner following his experience of grace through Jesus Christ. It is of no benefit to the Kingdom of God to call someone a sinner; instead, offer the grace of God so that they discover this for themselves.

The Kingdom and the Church

Jesus proclaimed the coming and the actual presence of the Kingdom of God in his own life and ministry. “But if I am casting out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has arrived among you” (Matt 12:28 NLT). But the Kingdom, while bringing redemption within the tragic, did not promise redemption from the tragic until the end of this temporal order and the coming of the Kingdom of God in glory. At the same time, Jesus said that his Kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). Paul taught that the Kingdom of God is not a matter of living by religious rules and regulations, but of “living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17 NLT).

The Kingdom of God confronts the world with the reality of what God intended for humanity and the way it is supposed to be, calling what is into a redemptive relation with God as Creator and Redeemer. The church is a sign of the Kingdom and acquires its identity and role in relation to the Kingdom. As such, the church is not the Kingdom of God, but an eschatological extension of the Kingdom into the present world order. In the end, it is not the church but the Kingdom of God that is presented to the Father by the Son in its fullness and completeness (1 Cor 15:17).

The church in its teaching and life, under biblical authority, is not only a place where we can come “just as we are,” but a place where we can experience the redemptive grace of God to become and live as God intended. This is the tragic aspect of the Kingdom of God and the form of the church in the world. It embraces what is tragic in the form of the failure of humanity to be and live in accordance with what God intended. At the same time in its teaching and practice it brings the tragic under the redemptive promise of healing, hope and ultimate overcoming of the tragic. For the church to exclude its neighbor, the homosexual person, is to forsake its own relation to the Kingdom of God and its authentic mission on earth.

Homosexuality and the church: a meditation on the tragic (Part One)

A guest-series by Ray S. Anderson

Following the recent ruling by the California Supreme Court permitting the marriage of same-sex couples, a newspaper report included a comment by two men following their marriage, “Now we are not living in sin.” The comment sounded somewhat sarcastic and was probably aimed more at the religious community rather than a description of their own spiritual condition. Nonetheless, it reminded me of the impasse created in the discussion of homosexuality when the label “sin” is used to portray same-sex cohabitation as unacceptable to many in the Christian community. It is not that homosexual persons are not sinners, as are all humans. “No one is righteous, not even one” (Rom 3:9 NLT). But to label homosexual orientation and practice as sin in order to justify exclusion from the church and its ministry is too simple. The issue is more complex than that. Is there an alternative?

During the 1960s when I was pastor of a small conservative church congregation, two men living together in a homosexual relationship, both graduates of a Bible school and with a clear Christian testimony, became friends of some in the church and eventually asked me if they could join. They both knew what the Bible taught concerning homosexuality and knew that my position and that of the church was based on this biblical teaching. My response was: of course you can join. This is not a church for those who are perfect but for those seeking Christian fellowship and a place to worship and grow in Christ.

The word “sin” was not mentioned, by them nor by me. If they had asked me if I considered homosexual practice a sin, I don’t know what I would have said. I hope that I would have said something like this. Do you believe that a same sex relation is what God intended when he created humans as sexual persons? They would have answered, “No, but this is the only way that we have found it possible to live and love. While others may say that we have a choice, for our part we feel that this relationship is the only one that fulfills our life and meets our needs.” In several other ways, they had communicated much the same to me.

The Tragic as a Human Condition

It was my former colleague, Lewis Smedes, who reminded me that in the area of human sexuality we should not ignore the tragic as a component of all and every human sexual experience. In the discussion of homosexuality, he said, don’t forget the tragic. Not that a same-sex relation is tragic as opposed to heterosexual relations, but that it is tragic because all human sexuality must be understood as necessarily an experience of the tragic. The key word here is “understood.” The difficulty for many heterosexual persons with regard to homosexuality is that they have no way of “understanding” how such a practice and relationship can be part of an authentic human experience, much less one that is Christian. The concept of the tragic may be one way of understanding the complex experience of human sexuality that underlies both heterosexual and homosexual tendencies and practice.

When I am able to understand what motivates a rebellious child to act out in anti-social ways, I gain insight in how to relate to that child rather than simply use labels to describe their behavior. In somewhat the same way, if homosexual behavior is simply labeled as “deviant” or a “perversion,” one is not only free from attempting to understand, but one makes no attempt. What is needed is an underlying structure of human existence rather than a practice of human behavior to begin to understand and then engage in discussion with homosexual persons with regard to the church and its ministry.

The tragic is not something that happens to humans following their creation out of the dust of the ground and endowed with the divine image – but to exist as that particular human person is tragic. Thus the tragic is not the result of the fall, as though humanity as originally created did not experience the tragic. Rather, the tragic exists precisely because human persons experience the freedom of self-conscious existence with virtually unlimited possibilities while, at the same time, remaining bound by necessity to the dust out of which they are created. The tragic is the result of the fact that humans cannot be in more than one place at a time, and they are aware of that.

When caught in a dilemma in which responsibility to help another is the most important, a decision has to be made. Failure to be able to meet both demands is tragic. Even the first humans were confronted with the tragic. Not everything that is possible, not everything that is good, can be chosen or accomplished or experienced. Being aware of that constitutes the tragic.

Søren Kierkegaard called this irreconcilable tension between possibility and necessity Dread. I prefer to call it the tragic. Dread became for him simply the psychological/spiritual moment of absolute self-awareness. The tragic is more a construct of human existence that underlies all human life, not merely a moment of awareness. As a construct of human existence, the tragic cannot be avoided though it can be denied, as Ernest Becker profoundly described in his book, The Denial of Death (Simon and Schuster, 1973).

True, there is an existential experience of dread, as Kierkegaard argued, that can only be overcome by faith. But if faith can overcome dread, it cannot overcome the tragic. The most significant human relation that Kierkegaard experienced was his engagement to Regina Olsen, an “instant love affair” that lasted for several years until he ended it by his own decision – for her own good, as he put it, even though he continued to love her. In the end, while he could apparently surrender everything to the infinite for the sake of faith, he did not have the kind of faith that permitted him to enact a finite relation of love without losing his own self. “Had I had faith I would have remained with Regina” (Journals, Harper Torch, 1958, p. 86). In the end, I would argue, what kept him from marriage with Regina was not lack of faith, but failure to understand the category of the tragic. Faith cannot overcome the tragic, as if marriage (as an act of faith) would remove the relationship from the category of the tragic.

The Tragic and Redemptive Grace

The tragic cannot be overcome and eliminated without destroying human life as we know it. Redemption of the tragic is an eschatological event. That is, it will only occur when the “new heavens and the new earth” emerge with the end of this temporal order. It is only then that “there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain” (Rev 21:4 NLT). Until that time, redemption of the tragic will be provisional and partial with intimations of that eschatological reality illuminating the landscape of the tragic while calling us to embrace the tragic with redemptive grace.

Redemption is always within the tragic, but not from the tragic. Redemption from one instance of the tragic leads to an expansion of the tragic, not the elimination of it. When Jesus healed the paralytic who had been unable to work and had lain by the pool of Bethesda for 38 years, this was a miracle of release from his tragic situation (John 5:1-8). But we are not told what happened to him nor how he was able to make a living, having lived by the charity of others for all those years. If he ended up healed but without the means of making a living for himself, that too is tragic.

When I come upon an apparently homeless person with a sign requesting money for food, I ordinarily pass by. Some would point to that person as a tragic person, an object of pity if not compassion. But the tragic is not an object but a relation. It is my relation to that person that constitutes the tragic. I recognize the demand placed upon me in our common humanity and his uncommon need. If I were to take that demand as an absolute moral demand and respond out of my own means as a way of overcoming the tragic, I have only magnified the tragic in the form of other humans who place their demand upon me and my resources as well. To give everything that I possess in response to the tragic situation of the needy, would be to compound the tragic with regard to my own children. Stanley Hauerwas reminds us of this when he says, “Marriage and family require time and energy that could be used to make the world better. To take the time to love one person rather than many, to have these children rather than helping the many in need, requires patience and a sense of the tragic” (A Community of Character, U of Notre Dame P, 1981, p. 172).

Theologian Wendy Farley says that “Created perfection is fragile, tragically structured” (Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion, WJKP, 1990, p. 127). She goes on to say: “The tragic structure of finitude and the human capacity for deception and cruelty together account for the possibility and actuality of suffering and evil.” Humans are finite beings, they possess awareness of the infinite but cannot fully realize it. In this sense, the tragic is not something from which humans can be redeemed and still be human, but redemption itself must take hold of and suffer the tragic if it is to approach and take hold of humans. Farley puts it this way: “But to overcome the tragic structure of finitude, to be free animate beings from all suffering, to determine finite freedom so that it will always love the good and have the courage to pursue it – these things are not possible. The potential for suffering and evil lie in the tragic structure of finitude and cannot be overcome without destroying creation” (p. 125).

Perhaps Farley would be better to speak of the fragility of humankind rather than the fragility of creation, for the kind of fragility I have described as tragic is peculiar to human beings. We may think it tragic to watch our nonhuman pets suffer and die, but this is a projection of the human tragic sense onto and into the created order. Evil, then, is the intensification of the tragic measured by its power to attack and destroy the good that God intended.

Following Farley’s insightful analysis, I would say that the freedom of creation in its own authentic nature – as differentiated ontologically from the Creator – is only tragic from the perspective of human beings who are endowed with a spiritual nature (imago Dei) which promises a destiny beyond that of its own creaturely nature. For all creatures but the human, their nature determines their destiny. For humans, their destiny lies beyond the power of a creaturely nature, though humans “suffer” from the exigencies of a creaturely nature. In this way, because love is a possibility of human existence which is in itself tragic, love is “intrinsically tragic,” for it is an investment of the self (the power of personal, spiritual being) in the face of the powers of nature, over which it is, at times, powerless.

One cannot consciously live with full awareness of the tragic, as Ernest Becker reminded us. Denial of the tragic may seem to be the only way to survive without losing one’s own existence. Nonetheless, the tragic continues to underlie human existence. Faith will not overcome it as an existential movement of the spirit, as Kierkegaard hoped. Faith itself is an eschatological point of reference that is grounded in the promise of God rather than in an immediate release from the tragic.

This is one reason why understanding homosexuality as part of the tragic construct of human sexuality may offer a more redemptive approach than simply to label it as “sin” in order to deny its right to exist.

The problem with primal harmony

“Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are … without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.”

—Paul F. M. Zahl, A Short Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 7.

Note: This is an unusual book. It includes some strangely arresting passages (such as the one quoted above), together with some strangely banal passages, such as this one (which is so bad that it is memorable): “The risen Christ has expanded to reach the frontiers of all human experience. Because he is nowhere in particular, he is everywhere in general” (p. 49).

Matt Jenson: The Gravity of Sin

Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on homo incurvatus in se (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 202 pp. (review copy courtesy of T&T Clark)

The doctrine of sin has fallen on hard times in recent decades, especially in the wake of Karl Barth’s argument that we can speak of sin only in the light of grace, so that an independent “doctrine of sin” becomes illegitimate. Of course, Barth himself developed a massive doctrinal account of sin; but his methodology has made subsequent generations of theologians reticent about this theme. Indeed, in a 1993 article, David Kelsey wondered: “Whatever happened to the doctrine of sin?”

It seems, however, that this situation is now changing. In recent years, Eberhard Jüngel has offered an intensive existential analysis of sin in his work on Justification (1999); Marilyn McCord Adams has offered a brilliant philosophical account of Horrendous Evils (1999); James K. A. Smith has argued for the hermeneutical significance of sin in The Fall of Interpretation (2000); Alistair McFadyen has demonstrated the ability of Christian language to interpret distinctively modern pathologies in Bound to Sin (2000); and younger scholars like Joy Ann McDougall (Emory) and Dirk Evers (Tübingen) are currently working towards new accounts of the doctrine of sin and its relationship to theological anthropology.

In this elegant study, Matt Jenson (a regular reader and commenter here at F&T) has made his own timely contribution to this renewed exploration of Christian talk about sin. Jenson takes up the traditional metaphor of humanity as “curved in on itself” (incurvatus in se), and he argues that this metaphor can serve as a model for the interpretation of diverse forms of human sinfulness within the broader framework of a relational anthropology. If human personhood is constituted by relationships, then sin can be understood “as a violation, perversion and refusal of those relationships” (p. 2).

Jenson begins by exploring the development of the introversion metaphor in the theology of Augustine. He offers a charitable (perhaps too charitable!) interpretation of Augustine’s theory of original sin – namely, that this is a “profoundly relational” affirmation of the involvement of all human beings with one another (p. 16). And he observes that, for Augustine, “freedom” and “autonomy” are mutually exclusive terms, since we are truly free only to the extent that we are turned towards God rather than towards ourselves. Nevertheless, Augustine threatens his own relational account of sin with his emphasis on a spirituality of inwardness. Such inwardness, as Luther later discovered, can itself become a powerful expression of sin, drawing us into “a disorienting spiral in on ourselves” (p. 45).

Luther thus built on – but radicalised – Augustine’s understanding of sin, since he saw clearly that the homo incurvatus in se may be precisely the same as the homo religiosus. While Augustine envisioned salvation as the healing of human nature, Luther’s more radical vision demanded nothing less than the death and resurrection of the sinful self. Still, both Luther and Augustine believed that the self is drawn out of itself only when it is turned towards God, so that its identity is located in him.

Luther’s account of sin and personhood has been subjected to sharp critique, especially by feminist theologians who believe that such a conception serves to underwrite oppressive and abusive power structures. Jenson explores this critique as it is developed in the work of the post-Christian feminist, Daphne Hampson. Hampson advances a relational theory of selfhood, but she rejects the metaphor of sin as a “curving inwards.” According to Hampson, this metaphor focuses on prideful egoism as the paradigm of human sinfulness, so that salvation is subsequently understood as a humbling of the proud. But she argues that this is a fundamentally masculinist conception of sin; women, after all, “have simply never been in the position of power which would give one the opportunity and the imaginative resources to conceive of a prideful setting oneself in the place of God” (p. 103). The focus on pride, then, simply entrenches women in the sins to which they really do incline, especially to a sinful diffusion of the self in others.

Jenson criticises this argument for its rather simplistic characterisation of the different gender-types of sin (men’s sin as self-assertion; women’s sin as self-denigration). But he notes that Hampson is right to emphasise the diversity of sins: we don’t all sin in the same way. He thus takes up Hampson’s two main categories: “we sin in both self-exaltation and self-denigration” (p. 128). Further, he accepts the crucial point that it is inadequate simply to regard “pride” as the paradigmatic form of all sins.

In the final chapter, Jenson thus asks whether the model of sin as curvature can be extended to describe “the (often radically) different experiences of people in sinning” (p. 130) – in particular, whether it can account for sins both of self-assertion and of self-denigration. These two main categories are in fact parallel to Karl Barth’s categorisation of the paradigmatic sins of “pride” and “sloth.” And Jenson argues that Barth’s construal of the types of sin broadens the scope of our understanding of sin in a way that “anticipate[s] many of the concerns of feminists” (p. 183). But while Daphne Hampson thinks of freedom as the endeavour to extricate the self from all forms of dependence (on God and on others), Barth offers a more radically relational vision of freedom: “freedom is always freedom ‘for another’ and as such has one direction and one direction only. That is the direction of the Son, whose way is towards God and others” (p. 181).

And so Jenson concludes that the concept of homo incurvatus in se provides a model which can interpret a diverse range of sinful experiences, while foregrounding the relational structure of human personhood. To be human is to be in relation; to be a sinner is to pursue relationlessness. The church, therefore, should be viewed as the body of people who are “called out” – “out of the world, yes, but also out of ourselves”! To be included in the church is to be among those “who live excurvatus ex se, finding … ourselves in Christ and in one another” (p. 190).

The Gravity of Sin is a stimulating and lucid account of Christian talk about sin, and it’s a welcome contribution to the contemporary retrieval of this doctrinal theme. Naturally, there are many remaining questions that a full reconstruction of the doctrine of sin would have to answer, such as:

• What is the connection between a relational model of sin and the broader social, political and economic structures of evil?
• What is the relationship between the dogmatic language of sin and contemporary biological, psychological and anthropological understandings of human personhood?
• What is the connection between the phenomena of sin and human mortality?
• What is the relationship between specific experiences of sin and the universality of sin?

If, as Jenson proposes, the concept of introversion can be taken up as a general model for the interpretation of sin, then one might also be able to bring fresh – and properly theological – approaches to questions such as these.