What the Hell Do We Do with "Sin"?

How the Concept of Sin Helps and Harms Us, Part 4

---

---

Dozens of us sat in the dark auditorium. The only light came from the stage. This was the event I had been waiting for. John D. Caputo would be out very soon. Truth be told, this event was the main reason I came to the 2005 Emergent conference in the first place. 

A couple of years before, I read his book Against Ethics. It introduced me to the use of philosophical deconstruction as a theological tool. That book was responsible for sending me in a completely different theological direction. 

Nearly two decades later, certain parts of that talk still stick with me. One in particular was a story he shared about someone critiquing something he had written. They said it was too complicated, and he needed to rewrite it. He pushed back saying that it said what he wanted it to say. And the person responded, “If it means anything at all, it can be said another way.”

Here’s the question…

Does that statement also apply to traditional theological language and concepts? Or is there a reason to stick with traditional expressions because they are the traditional expressions?

Postmodern culture is experiencing a meaning crisis.

Why have we lost sight of Meaning?
Is there any hope of getting it back?
Better yet, is the loss of Meaning really a bad thing?

If you long for a path forward, Drinking from an Empty Glass: Living Out of a Meaningless Spirituality is the book you’re looking for.

Christian concepts, Christian traditions

I have no idea how many denominations there are in the United States. But each one of them began because of a theological disagreement. One portion of a wider group believed that the wider group’s theology (and thus the way it was behaving) was wrong. Therefore, they broke off and became their own thing. 

So, today we have more strands of Christianity than we can count. This makes it extremely difficult to say what a theological concept is supposed to mean. Given all the possible answers to theological questions, how does one respond to…

• What is grace? 

• What is atonement? 

• What is salvation? 

And, yes, even…

• What is sin? 

For better or worse, the real answer is, “It depends.”

It depends on which tradition you consider authoritative. While they all use the same language (and, yes, there can be crossover), there are now many different meanings to those words, and not all of them dovetail. 

So, if I may tip my hand a bit, even though I’ve spent this month talking about the concept of “sin”, what I’ve really been talking about is what is understood as “sin” in Christian traditions for the most part. There are several traditions that would say, “But that’s not how we understand ‘sin’”. 

This plurality of meaning for theological concepts isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think different perspectives into the same thing can be incredibly enriching. In fact, I love learning about new theological perspectives. They tend to give me fresh insight. 

But, it also reveals a problem when it comes to updating Christian theology. 

The typical approach

From what I gather, when theologians think differently about their concepts and come up with new understandings, they typically fill the old words with new meaning (even if it's at odds with the traditional understanding).

Peter Rollins, a radical theologian, seems to be a popular current example of this. A while back, I watched a video where he said that he likes to use traditional language to talk about what he's doing, even though he means something different when he says it. 

This definitely has its advantages. As a result, he establishes continuity between what he is doing and the wider Christian tradition. And, he isn't being disingenuous in any way. Remember, as the saying goes, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living”. In other words, inasmuch as tradition is a living and dynamic thing, it evolves.

Generally speaking, I don't have an issue with this approach. But, in the case of “sin”, we may have a problem…

The concept of “sin” has been used as a weapon for spiritual abuse and has participated in the destruction of human lives. For the most part, our culture knows it and “sin” is now a trigger word for many, especially those recovering from religious trauma.