Ants

I vaguely recall this poem we dissected for a class period in Senior English titled "Ants." It went like this:

Adam had'em.

Like all good poetry, it rhymes. I suppose it was an exercise in critical thinking more than anything else, but as it turns out, the poem also has a relevant spiritual message. Turns out, if the reader so responds, "Ants" is a clever way of talking about sin. Now if I recall my grad. school training correctly, I'm not supposed to be a Calvinist. So when it comes to TULIP, I don't believe in TOTAL depravity, but just depravity. Ants = sin. Adam had'em, and so do I. Here's another good one, supposedly attributed to Luther.

"The old Adam is a good swimmer."

Now there's a good one for us dunkers. You can immerse all you want, but turns out, it is pretty hard to drown the old man - and I'm not talking about your dad. Maybe we need to start holding them under longer... So, yet another clever way of saying that humans typcially (I type that tongue in cheek) have a problem with sin. Seriously, what's the deal with sin?

Here's my reflection based on something I just read by Will Willimon (see sidebar). Sin is, by all accounts, something every person has, struggles with, falls into, lives in, etc. I started to write, "Sin does appear..." or "Sin seems" but that would contradict what I want to say. Here's the thing about sin: it is real. Now, granted, I may not have to convince any of my readers, but it's likely that you readers know someone who does need some convincing. I would argue that we live in a world that is increasingly in need of some convincing on this topic. However, I think we have some flawed logic in what I have experienced in terms of methodology (how we do what we do) and epistemology (how we know what we know).

Example: I have friends who do not believe in God, or, while they have some form of belief, do not follow The Way. Now why should I expect them to act any differently than they do? If they cuss, drink, are sexually immoral, and live a generally immoral lifestyle, why should I be surprised by that? Wouldn't you live that way, if you didn't believe in God?

Now there's the question that gets us. "Surely not I!?!?" you exclaim. "I would still be a good person." Well, maybe so. But what blinds us, and ultimately leads us to think we would still be good without a knowledge of God through Christ happens to be the very same thing (knowledge of God through Christ). I don't know how we got skewed into this thinking but stick with me on this one - I promise I'm not saying that knowledge of God through Christ is a bad thing in any way.

Somehow, in our pseudo-Christian American culture, we came to the conclusion that everyone is generally good. We have scientific results to back up the reality of something called conscience. The problem is, and what Christians assumed, is that our consciences are part of the image of God that God put in us at creation. Well, maybe that's true. But I have a feeling that somewhere along the way, our consciences became more of a social construction. If I'm not a Christian, I don't have a Christian conscience. I may have a conscience, but its standard for morality is only a social construction. Watch TV, listen to music, go to the movies, consume your media of choice, and you'll find out quickly that the Christian conscience and the American conscience are growing apart quickly. The point is that we can no longer appeal to the innate human condition of conscience as evidence of the human sin condition.

Instead, I say that we ought to appeal to Christ as our evidence of sin. Sin is only secondarily about not doing something right or doing something wrong. Sin is primarily about separation from God. I believe that Christians have been arguing from conscience about sin being a matter of morailty (bad method that sounds good). What we ought to be doing is talking about sin being a matter of broken relationship with the Creator. And here's where epistemology comes into play. We know what we know about sin ONLY because of Jesus. It is only through the language and culture of Christ that we can adequately describe what sin is and what it does to us.

So all this time, maybe we've been doing it backwards. We think if we can convince people they are sinners, then they will feel a need for Jesus. But how can we convince them of their sin if we do not first give them a language in which to adequately speak about it? If I say to someone who is not a Christian, "You are a sinner." What does that mean to them? It probably means exactly what we are seeing in so many churches today. It probably means that they need to learn how to be moral people who are nominal at best and who never learn how to develop a meaningful relationship with God. It means that if they want to stop being sinners, they need to do things that make them feel like not sinners, as in going to church and giving money and taking communion.

So what is the solution? I'm not really sure. What I think is that we need to focus our discussion of sin more on what it means to have a relationship with God through Christ and how sin prevents that. I think we need to focus less on sin as a morality issue. I think we need to stop assuming that sin is best argued as a matter of conscience. And most of all, I think we need to realize that sin is something we understand and talk about only through Christ. Our discussion of sin does not lead us to Jesus, rather our discussion of God and His Son lead us to sin.