…don’t offend my faith, but my elementary knowledge of history and common sense.
Take this:
In response, I close my eyes, pinch the bridge of my nose, and mumble, “And what would you call it when somebody exploits the vulnerable for profit, if not sin?”
Here’s the thing: if you are going to declare sin a “construct created by the Church” you are going to have to account for the fact that sin is an idea that predates the Church by centuries.
So, long before the Church you have ancient Israel with an entire Mosaic law both warning Israel of sinning against God and offering them various ways to appeal to God for forgiveness of sin. You have people like David Living His Truth by stealing Uriah’s wife, raping her, and then sending the loyal Uriah off to the front lines to be abandoned and killed to get him out of the way. You have Nathan the prophet, not the Pope, appealing not to David’s wallet, but to David’s own conscience by asking him, as king, to judge the case of a rogue loose in his dominions who had stolen a poor man’s ewe lamb to serve to guests while he himself was stinking rich. David, not unlike any unbeliever today, thought that was a shitty thing to do and said that the SOB who did it should die. No appeal to Church law involved for the very good reason that the Church would not exist for a thousand years. Nathan replied to David, “YOU ARE THE MAN!” and confronted him with his own crime.
In response, David (again with no help from Pope, bishop, or priest) realized with horror his own guilt and composed Psalm 51 to plead for the mercy of God, not with donations to the Vatican, but out of the sheer gratuitous grace of God that could not be earned since he was, in fact, guilty as hell:
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your merciful love;
according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless in your judgment.
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Behold, you desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Make me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones which you have broken rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
and take not your holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
Deliver me from bloodguilt, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth shall show forth your praise.
For you take no delight in sacrifice;
were I to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
then will you delight in right sacrifices,
in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;
then bulls will be offered on your altar. (Ps 51:1–19).
Somehow, Israel in general and David in particular seem to have been acutely aware of the Church’s “construct” of sin a thousand years before there was a Church to construct it.
Relatedly, if your are going to make this charge, you are also going to have to account for the fact that critiques like this themselves rely on the concept of sin for their moral force. For, of course, what David accuses himself of–exploitation of the poor, abuse of power (in this case to commit rape, adultery and murder and not mere fraud or theft) is exactly the same charge Jen brings against the Church. Cutting off the branch you are sitting on is a poor way to proceed.
It turns out, in short, that consciousness of sin long predates the existence of the Church. It also turns out that the concept of sin continues to dominate the minds of post-Christian critics of the Faith who keep on imagining that their moral conceptions are “self-evident” when they owe everything to mystical Christian beliefs in stuff like intrinisic human dignity, the debt that the strong owe to the least of these, and human equality. What the Church brought to the table in antiquity was not the awareness of sin, but the possibility that sin could be forgiven, no matter who you were and no matter what you had done, because of the death and resurrection of Jesus for the sins of the world. What it brings to the table in post-modernity is an ability to account for the assumptions about human dignity that post-Christian liberalism takes for granted and foolishly assumes will stay with us through all eternity even when you cut them off from their roots in the Christian tradition.
Virtually every attack on the Christian tradition is completely dependent on that tradition. Many of those attacks, including this one, are also stunningly ignorant of the history they invoke to make the attack.
Suggested reading: https://amzn.to/3U7kXKs
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12 Responses
She is wrong but there is a grain of truth in this. Some Bishops are charlatans.
Many televangelists are indeed charlatans as well.
While she might have overstated her case regarding sin as a general concept, the truth is that each religion gets to define their own ideas of what constitutes a sin.
In that regard, there are “sins” defined by the Catholic Church, like the Sunday obligation, that on its face come across as being entirely too self-serving. That is to say nothing about the Church’s view of human sexuality, which treats something like masturbation as a sin, which seems rather arbitrary and guilt inducing for what would otherwise be considered normal human behavior.
Of *course* our conceptions of sin are culturally conditioned (to a degree). But I think you vastly overstate your case. The Sunday obligation, for instance, proceeds logically from the command to “love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and the concurrent believe that he is therefore due our worship. But the Sunday obligation is itself merely a precept, a way of keeping some basic order in the Church. There are very sensible exception to the rule of thumb (traveling, sickness, absence of a priest, etc.). And there are no Sunday Police enforcing anything. God commands worship. Jesus says, “Do this in memory of me.” And the People of God settled on Sunday worship (because of the Resurrection) already during the apostolic period. So John begins his Revelation with “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” (Translation: I was at Mass. It was a Sunday.”) Likewise, stuff like the various pelvic issues are attempts at logically working through the consequences of taking seriously that the body matters, is created by God for his glory and for the love of neighbor (including that neighbor called our spouse).
It’s perfectly true that different cultures understand the implications of the two greatest commandments (Love God/love neighbor) in different ways and that those different understandings can ramify like branches and root systems in different ways. And, of course, that also applies not only to various Christianities, but to all religious and even secular systems. So, for instance, the quarrel between TERFs and trans advocates is a quarrel between two different visions of what “defending the underdog” (a priority that comes directly from the Jewish and Christan traditions) look like when it is applied to two different post-modern traditions of feminism.
To complain that different religious traditions have different conceptions of what is sinful seems like a huge waste of time. What would you expect? The central point is that all human beings, like it or not, have a conception of sin and virtue.; The honest ones admit the fact that when they do, they root it, in the final analysis, in something transcendant, however much leeway they may give to the vagariies of taste, culture, circumstance, and opinion.
I think we are conflating different meanings for the word sin. You seem to be talking about “sin” as something that is opposed to virtue, while I and the tweet’s author are referring to “sin” as something that is offensive to God. Keep in mind that from an outsider’s perspective, those are not necessarily the same thing.
Now, regarding Church attendance, I don’t take issue with the theological reasoning for determining that worshipping God is both virtuous and deserving. I also don’t take issue with the pragmatic realities necessary to facilitate and organize such worship. However, what doesn’t sit well with me is the idea that failing to so in a very specific manner, i.e. going to Church, rises to the level of a sin and not just a failure to adhere to tradition.
Honestly, to me, that seems like a Church problem, not a God problem. I get what you’re saying, but the cynical outsider in me can’t stop seeing it as a post-hoc rationalization; as something that is being mandated primarily for the institution’s sake.
“You seem to be talking about “sin” as something that is opposed to virtue,” Right. Because that’s what the Catholic moral tradition does.
Yeah, I understand that is what the Church teaches about sin.
However, outside of that context and for the world at large, the term “sin” is used to denote “something that is opposed to virtue, according to the Church (or a religion)”, which is distinct from something “actually” being opposed to virtue. I get that from the Church’s perspective those are one and the same, but that is not necessarily the case for everyone else.
She is using a church word “sin” and applying definitions to it that are inaccurate. This is deceitful and in bad faith.
If she wanted to have a conversation in good faith, she would research what exactly does the church mean by sin.
The prohibition against contraception is ignored by perhaps 90% of the laity (myself included). It makes no sense from a practical standpoint, and from my experience is practiced by mostly right wing fanatics. Is this a hill that you want to die on?
I wouldn’t attach any political labels to people practicing NFP. Go and read Simcha Fisher’s blog. Considering vicious attacks on NFP from the rad trad Catholics, I seriously doubt right wing fanatics practice NFP. Most of them either “practice” “providential” “planning”, or find forced and flawed justifications for using artificial contraception.
If anything, I’d rather expect NFP is inherently leftist due to the strong environmentalist bent.
There are also at least four more reasons for right wing fanatics to not use NFP:
1. It requires the coöperation of both spouses in observing, tracking and charting the symptoms. While some of the workload can be offloaded to apps and wireless enabled thermometers, it still puts at least some workload on the husband.
2. It requires the coöperation of both spouses in learning and understanding the woman’s menstrual cycle. It requires the husband to learn and intimately know the intricacies of the “icky” stuff that a woman secretes.
3. It requires the coöperation of both spouses in abstaining from sex during the fertile period if they’re not trying to conceive. It’s apparently a very heavy burden on a lot of men* and their ego simply cannot stand not having sex they’re entitled to.
4. It requires the husband to actively cherish and cultivate his wife’s responsive desire when she’s naturally less inclined to desire spontaneous sex. If toxic masculinity regard foreplay as unmanly**, this goes double for fore-foreplay.
*) Myself included. I know first-hand the difficulty of practicing NFP and how easy it would be to find justification for using artificial contraception or to ignore the reasons for avoiding conception and just letting ourselves go.
**) This is the attitude that says sex is not romantic and that romance is the currency with which men pay for sex. It is a toxic attitude that demands wives to be accessible*** whenever their husbands express a need for sex.
***) Accessible doesn’t imply ready. If a woman is not ready for sex and it’s painful, unpleasant and unfulfilling, sucks to be her, she only needs to be accessible.
Yeah, she has a really incomplete and immature understanding of “humanity.”
The notion of virtue, and shortcoming to virtue, has been around since before Christianity, and has been present in all cultures of the world.
Where do these twits come from?
Hindus have Adharma, in common with Buddhists, the ancient Egyptians had the concept, the natural religions of sub-Saharan Africa, the Polynesians, the Mexica, everyone on earth. What might explain THAT? Maybe a garden and a catastrophe?
It’s true that “Original Sin” is a kind of invention, a way to give meaning to scripture; sort of “Well, you might think about it like this…” But every culture saw personal sin as a pollution of the world that would pollute everyone. If a kind of “inheritance” is the image that worked in the Mediterranean region, fine. It’s not wrong to understand it like that. If I remember right, it was St. Augustine that first formulated this.
And the funniest thing about that is that Original Sin is absolved in Baptism as a free gift, only noting that human condition is fundamentally flawed and thus needed to be redeemed, and again, it’s done for free.
Feeling guilty for being human? How so, if God the Son became incarnate and elevated humanity beyond mere creation?
I find it unsurprisingly dull that all those who make statements like these usually use them to renounce the existence of sexual sins as if they’re the most important ones (which is predictably the thing they accuse the Churches of: making it all about sex). And at the same time, they’re absolutely selective about what constitutes a sin. Infidelity? If an unpopular person/an enemy does that, they’re cheaters/homewreckers. If a popular person/a friend, then they’re experimenting/exploring/having an affair.