Sin: A Guide for the Perplexed by Nelson Derek R

Author:Nelson, Derek R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2011-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

SOCIAL SIN 1: RELATIONALITY AND THE FORMATION OF THE SINFUL SELF

Whether, in fact we regard [sin] as guilt and deed or rather as a spirit and a state, it is in either case common to all; not something that pertains severally to each individual and exists in relation to him by himself, but in each the work of all, and in all the work of each; and only in this corporate character, indeed, can it be properly and fully understood.

—Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison1

For a long, long time in Christian theology and theological anthropology, it was possible, indeed common, to conceive of sin wholly and exclusively in terms of the individual sinner. Sin was thought to be a distortion of the sinner’s will, intellect, or reason. For Augustine, the root sin was pride. For Luther, it was unbelief. For Calvin, it was disobedience. But this kind of narrowness in approaching the doctrine of sin has been greatly questioned in recent years. In fact, at least two striking developments in theological anthropology have become practically axiomatic over the course of the last few decades. The first of these is that the doctrine of sin must no longer be understood solely in individualistic categories. The sins of which Christians in the latter half of the twentieth century were most keenly aware include, but are not limited to, such things as racism, sexism, the enforcement of global poverty, and the destruction of our natural environment. Such complex phenomena simply are not easily reducible to the discrete sins of morally culpable individual agents. The evil is too complicated and too firmly located in social structures of human action for us to think of the sin as being solely a matter of individual humans’ wills. The cumulative evil of the Holocaust cannot be simply the added individual sins of each hand that organized a round up of Jewish refugees, steered a railroad car of prisoners, or stoked a furnace in a crematorium. We have recovered a sense of structural sin; one that includes, but also transcends, the individual and the personal. The second development is the emphasis on relationality in conceiving of the human self. No longer can we understand human persons apart from the relationships that affect, or as some would have it, constitute, their selves.

The office of the Vatican primarily in charge of identifying sins and overseeing their absolution is known as the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Penitentiary. An official from this office, the Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, recently offered a list of seven “new” deadly sins. Girotti was interviewed by the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, and therein outlined new ways that humanity breaches its relationship with God. Girotti noted, “While sin used to concern mostly the individual, today it has mainly a social resonance.” The new seven deadly sins are: “bioethical” violations like birth control, “morally dubious” experiments

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