Fall
Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent, wrote a witty piece entitled “The Seven Deadly Ills” for The Spectator. In it he makes a stunning admission for a secularist. Perhaps we need the Christian category of “sin” after all.
Once upon a time, there were seven deadly sins. They were called deadly because they lead to spiritual death and therefore damnation. The seven sins were (and are): lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride. Now, all of them, with the exception of pride, have become medical conditions. Pride has become a virtue.40
The trouble is, according to Furedi, that to medicalize a moral problem prevents its remedy. He concludes:
To be honest, as a humanist, I don’t much like the idea of sin. But given the choice of being powerless in the face of God or an impotent client of a therapist, I side with the church. Therapeutic definitions of addiction elevate the sense of human powerlessness to a level unimaginable in medieval times. . . . Addicts are told that they will never be completely cured. We have recovering sex addicts, recovering religious addicts and recovering alcoholics. No one ever really changes.41
Furedi is not opposed to therapy per se. Rather he is alarmed by the way we avoid moral responsibility with a linguistic sleight of hand.
The Bible reader should not be surprised by any of this. Blame-shifting starts as early as Genesis 3 and the tragic turn of events that Augustine termed the “Fall” and Jacques Ellul called the “Rupture.” The story of paradise lost is simply told but the resonances are profound. The Creator has a design for life that involves trusting his words of promise and warning. But the man and the woman trust the serpent and their own judgment—that forbidden tree looks so good and the serpent is so plausible. Theologians speculate as to the essence of the Fall. Was it pride? Was it sensuality? Was it rebellion? Was it pride in the male and a failure to take responsibility on the part of the female? Was it unbelief? For the earliest commentary we need to read the Apostle Paul who in his letter to Christians at Rome, the fifth chapter, summed up the falling away as disobedience, a transgression, a trespass and a sin.
Sin is the great spoiler. Man and woman fall away from God’s good and generous design for life. The third chapter of Genesis shows the consequences of sin. The relationship with the Creator is ruptured. Instead of familiarity there is now alienation. The relationship with one another is ruptured. Added to the will to companionship between man and woman there is now the will to dominate the other and shift blame to the other. Even the expression of human sexuality is impacted. Pedophilia, rape, the commodification of women and pornography are obvious examples. The relationship within ourselves is ruptured. A fear of exposure replaces openness before God: shame has come, and the clothing industry. The relationship with the environment is ruptured. It is thorns, thistles, the sweat of the brow, and back to the dust from which we came. As Pascal gloomily puts it, “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”42
We are now paradoxical beings. In one of his pensées, Pascal wisely contends, “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.”43 In his book Faith Seeking Understanding, Daniel L. Migliore joins the chorus with this observation:
We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel.44
Pascal argues that a believable religion “must also account for such amazing contradictions.”45 The Christian doctrine of sin is that part of the frame of reference that does just that.
Many implications follow from the biblical story line at this point. We should not be surprised if there is some ambiguity to our reading the world. There are pointers to God (the good things we experience, such as a beautiful sunset) and pointers away from God (the evils we experience and see, such as famine in Africa). The apostle Paul argues that we live in a groaning creation that itself needs to be set free from the bondage to decay (Romans 8:18–25). That is realism, realism that should carry over to realism about ourselves. We are not “noble savages” who are simply corrupted by civilization, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought. The problem is far deeper than the failure to be educated aright. There is a problem endemic to the human heart, which in biblical terms is the core of who we really are. The heart is where our willing, thinking, and feeling have their home. Hard personal experience of his own moral failures taught C. E. M Joad to rethink his earlier naiveté about human nature. He wrote,
We on the left were always being disappointed. Disappointed by the refusal of people to be reasonable, by the subservience of intellect to emotion, by the failure of true socialism to arrive, by the behavior of nations and politicians, by the masses’ preference of Hollywood to Shakespeare, of Sinatra to Beethoven. Above all, we are disappointed by the recurrent fact of the war. The reason for our disappointment is that we have rejected the doctrine of original sin.46
As we noted earlier, Nobel prize-winning author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn observed the line of good and evil running through every human heart.
Evil is real—not only moral evils involving the human will, such as the Holocaust, but also natural evils such as a disease amongst wild animals (e.g., Equine flu). The biblical story, however, is far less concerned about the theoretical challenges that such evils pose—a very real interest of the philosopher—as much as the practical one, namely, what is to be done about it. Put another way, the story says very little about the arrival of the problem of evil, that is, how it got here, but much about the survival problem of evil, that is, what is being done to address it. And that involves a mysterious promise found in the third chapter of Genesis about the birth of a male child connected to the defeat of the serpent (“a crushed head”) and what that defeat will cost him (“a bruised heel”).