Sin is Out!

Summary:

Religious traditions, particularly the Abrahamic faiths, have developed a notion of sin as failure to comply with the diktat of a divine monarch. It is our failure to comply that is responsible for all of the troubles and distress in the world. This divine monarch gave us a perfect world and told us how to live in it. We rebelled, we sinned, we failed to comply, and so we mucked up this perfect world and can only hope for some future or posthumous act of God—some heavenly realm or messianic age—to set it right. In the meantime, those who fail to follow this diktat are rebelling against God and need to be ostracized, marginalized, demonized, eliminated, killed. But this view is wrong. Our scriptures are not the embodiment of some divine, monarchic diktat. They are teachings that allow us to connect to the the harmony, balance, beauty and sacredness of the cosmos, to bring that into our lives and to project out into the world.

Full text:

Historians of religion note an interesting development that seems to occur in what has come to be known as “The Axial Age,” beginning in the 8^th century BCE or there abouts. Witnessed perhaps in the transition from Vedic religion in India to the Upanishads and the advent of the classical literary prophets in Israel, the Axial Age can be simplistically understood as a transition from polytheism to monotheism—from a pantheon of gods organized into a hierarchy to the conception of a single divine power that creates and sustains the entire cosmos.

In the older polytheistic structure, the gods were surely understood as superior to humans. Yet, inasmuch as the polytheistic gods embodied the forces of nature or were, themselves, the personified, anthropomorphic forms of the forces of nature, there was a certain earthiness in the characterizations. They interacted directly with humans and, indeed, sometimes engaged in sexual relations with humans resulting in the appearance of demigods like Gilgamesh, Heracles and Achilles.

But what students of religion generally notice is how  the recognition of a single divine presence in the universe had a tendency to create a certain alienation of the human from the divine as this singular divine presence became more transcendent—a force that presides over nature rather than a force of nature.

A transcendent deity removed from the earth and from nature tends to desacrilize the world. More significantly, a transcendent male deity defeminizes the cosmos and removes the mythic connection between “father sky” and “mother earth.”

One of the consequences of this divine transcendence and alienation is a concomitant concept of a distinction between a perfect, transcendent divine realm of being and the imperfection of the world—what the great scholar of religion Robert Bellah termed “world rejection.” I would suggest that there is a connection between this world rejection and what emerges in ancient Israel in the evolution of the covenant relationship between God and Israel. It goes something like this. God gives us a perfect world and we humans muck it up. God gives us a way of living—a Torah—that is understood as God’s blueprint for an ideal society living in a perfect world. This Torah becomes a covenant—a pact—between God and God’s people, a pact that insists that as long as God’s people faithfully carry out the blueprint, then God will keep God’s end of the bargain and ensure the well-being of the covenant community.

But the world is not perfect, and really bad things happen, like the conquest of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 586 BCE resulting in the destruction of Jerusalem, God’s holy city and the seat of God’s earthly abode, the Temple. How could such a thing happen? Did God abandon God’s people? No? The people abandoned God. It’s their fault. The covenant community sinned. It was unfaithful to the requirements of the covenant, so God punished them with conquest, destruction and exile. So the world is not perfect; really bad things happen, and it’s our fault. These bad things happened as punishment for our sins.

I would suggest that there is a next stage in this evolution of the religion of ancient Israel that then has an impact on the evolution of Judaism and the development of Christianity. Two parallel and related developments mark this evolution: dualism and apocalyptic. It seems that these two developments occurred under the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism, which would have come into Judaism in the immediate post-exilic period under Persian rule and would have been advanced under the syncretistic influence of Hellenism. Dualism sees the world in very strict binary terms: absolute good and absolute evil, both as cosmic forces and in the division of humanity into the holy ones, the elect, on the one hand, and the enemies of the good on the other. This cosmic and ethical dualism also plays out as chronological dualism, an understanding of a current wicked era and a forthcoming age of perfection. Apocalyptic injects the concept of an impending cataclysmic cosmic battle between these forces that puts an end to the current wicked era and brings about an age of perfection. Only God’s true loyal followers, those who remain completely faithful to God’s covenant, only those who are devoid of sin, will enter this new age. “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” says John the Baptist in his prologue to the appearance of Jesus. That the cosmic battle and the “end days” did not occur spawned another development, the notion of posthumous judgment. No, the new era has not dawned, but those who are sin free can expect to enjoy its fruits after death in a heavenly realm, while the sinners will be posthumously punished.  

I would suggest that all of this contributes further to the sense of world rejection that western religion seems to have embraced over the last 2,000 years or so. Not only are we alienated from a transcendent God, but we are also alienated from a world that is mucked up due to our sins, and all we can hope for is either the end of this world and the creation of a new one, or our removal from this world to a perfect heavenly realm. I further suggest that since this world is mucked up and is nothing but the entry foyer to the next world, we are free to muck it up even more.

But it’s all wrong. No, we are not all sinners, as many of my students will insist, and I would suggest that this concept leads to some sinful thought and sinful behavior. If our scriptures are understood as embodying the diktat of some divine monarch, and that failure to conform to that diktat is construed as sin, then it is quite easy to move from that thought to the notion that failure to comply is a rebellion against God. It is then quite easy to move from that principle to the need to eliminate those anti-divine elements in an effort to restore or facilitate some putative perfect divine order. To redeem this mucked up world, the sinner must be ostracized, marginalized, demonized, eliminated, killed.

But again, this is all wrong! Our scriptures do not embody the diktat of a cosmic monarch. They are teachings, guidance, instruction for how we can place our lives within a cosmic framework. Where science is a teaching that allows us to observe the universe and to formulate general principles as to how it operates, religion is a teaching that allows us to be a meaningful and significant part of that universe, to participate in it, to bring its harmony, balance, beauty, mystery and sacredness into our lives and to use our lives in a way that will project into the world that same harmony, balance, beauty, mystery and sacredness.

That’s what Jewish worshippers mean when, after declaring God’s holiness, we take three steps backward and recite, oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu ve-al kol Yisrael ve-all kol yoshevei tevel,” May the One who brings peace and harmony to the cosmos, bring peace and harmony to the entire human community.”

Failure to observe these teachings is not sin to be punished. It is a lost opportunity to bring just a bit more peace, a bit more harmony and balance, a bit more sacredness into our lives and into the world.