Lessons in Change

Chapter One: "Original Sin"

I just finished watching the excellent drama miniseries Lessons in Chemistry based on the book by the same name, authored by Bonnie Garmus. In eight episodes it portrays the (fictional) story of Elizabeth Zott a chemist living in 60s America who contends with among other things, gender stereotypes and the three “L’s” - Life, Loss and Love. Through it all a subplot of science interacting with faith is so deftly handled that C.S. Lewis would have been proud.

Spoiler alert, in the final scene Zott is in front of a classroom of university students teaching “Intro to Chemistry.” She begins by passing out a long colorful hand-made paper chain. (The kind we used to make as kids.)

Zott explains, “living things are made up of atoms, but in most cases those atoms are not floating around individually, instead they are interconnected with other atoms.”

A student asks, “Is it random which atoms are connected with other atoms?”

Zott replies, “look at your own life, you can’t anticipate the moments – looking backwards you can see how it was all connected … However, the only variable in a chemical reaction is change, the unexpected. Our job here is not to avoid surprise, we can’t control it. There is only one thing left to do, it is to surrender. You don’t have to accept the bad, but we do have to accept the inevitability of change in ourselves and our circumstances.”

She then picks up the book “Great Expectations,” by Charles Dickens and begins reading.

"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."

Change is life. And that is as true for the Christian as anyone else. I have entitled this and the next series of posts “Lessons in Change”. In my interviews with Bible college students who graduated, the one constant question I asked was, what have you kept and what have you thrown away from your time in Bible college? For some time, I have been asking myself that same question. It is also what happens when you plan to attend a 50-year high school graduation this summer. What follows in the next few posts are some of my own personal answers mixed with the responses of others I have recorded.

Like most children raised in a broadly speaking evangelical context, I quickly learned that a thing called “sin” was bad. If asked what sin was I could recount my sins on a given week - those actions which disappointed my parents and on occasion raised their ire. Everything from riding my bike on a Sunday to not sharing with my brother(s). Noted my understanding of sin was not very nuanced as a seven-year-old.

Today I may value professor Susan Nelson’s definition of sin as “the human refusal to accept and live within the anxiety-building parameters of the human condition and the practice of securing ourselves in way that are idolatrous and have grave implications of ourselves, others, and our world.”[1] Or if that is a bit too much I also value British writer Francis Spufford who simply describes sin as “the human propensity to f#@k (abbreviation mine) things up. (HPtFtU) … It’s our active inclination to break stuff, ‘stuff’ here including moods, promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people’s as well as material objects whose high gloss positively seems to invite a big fat scratch.”[2] However, as a child either of those definitions would have been lost on me. Perhaps repeating that second definition would have been considered a sin in itself in my day. Also lost to me was any idea that sin is genetically passed down from conception to everyone - in Latin  peccatum originalis or “original sin”. Depending on how you read Genesis 3 the claim is made we are born separated from God’s good graces. Blame Adam or Eve if you like but in the end we all suffer the same fate. At a young age your only hope, depending on your denominational persuasion is either infant baptism or staying under the “age of accountability.”

Whether I understood any of that or not, it did not prevent me from being indoctrinated early on that I was a sinner and needed to get saved[3] sooner than later to avoid a wrathful God. Fortunately for my own identity and well-being at the time, never once did I sense I was outside the purview of the love of my parents. Nonetheless gathering what little knowledge I had as a ten year old I made the decision to follow Jesus and get “right” with God.

And so dated November 1967 in the margin of my small Gideon New Testament Bible just above the words, THIS BOOK NOT TO BE SOLD, “I wrote, “Accepted the Lord as personal Saviour Oct 14, 1967 at Lakeshore Evangilical (sic) Church, during special meetings with Rev. Don Cantelon as evangelist.” In subsequent years after many rededications, of being born again and again and again, I headed to Bible College. It was there for the first time that I really began questioning this equation.

The course was anthropology. The assignment was “original sin.” For the uniformed while the construct “original sin” does not appear in the Genesis account it originates there. And thanks to Augustine, Tertullian, Ambrose and others it found its way into the church’s vocabulary. In time “original sin” was twinned with sexuality leading to the conclusion all humans are born with this contagion passed on by Adam[4] or Eve, again depending on your own interpretation.

Of the many essays and term papers I wrote during these formative Bible College years (1975-78) this assignment is the only one I distinctly remember. For many years I kept it in a file, but alas it disappeared at some point. I remember it to this day because in a class of 30 plus students I was only one of two people who argued against the doctrine. To be sure it was not because of any firm ideological commitment on my part, but going against the grain was my modus operandum in those days. You say left I would often go right. All I really knew at that moment about original sin was curiously the term is nowhere mentioned in the Bible, but everybody seems to take it for granted.[5] And so I wondered what would happen if I went against the flow and questioned its validity. I found out - you get a C+. I had not yet learned that conformity is next to godliness or at least it produces less conflict.

To be sure the paper was probably not very good. I was not a young Martin Luther trying to set the church right on erroneous doctrine.[6] My argument was probably not very cogent. I did, however, note that the word “sin” itself is not mentioned until Gen 4.7 where sin is “lurking at the door (not inside a person) and … you must master it.”[7] I also noticed that Adam and Eve did not die per se but their eyes of innocence were opened and they suddenly discovered themselves as naked. In other words, an innocence was lost, and shame was introduced. Nevertheless, in the end, I filed my paper, resigned my objections, and fell in line with peccatum originalis for many years.

I mention this episode as an opening foray into my subsequent theological shifts because not only did I eventually return to my objections, I discovered I was not alone in questioning the presuppositions behind original sin. I still readily concede sin is ubiquitous. Spufford’s HPtFtU perhaps says it clearest. But is sin the truest first thing we conclude about ourselves. Not according to Genesis 2. The first thing said about humanity is goodness. Genesis 1:26, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our image…God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” In short, this conviction has changed my core theological understandings and ultimately my relationship to God as perhaps no other tenet.

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At conception my parents did not wait for my consent before they started loving on me ... how much more..

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If the starting point is “original sin,” at the very moment of conception humanity is positioned in a war against God. God’s good creation by default is now evil and God must look away. To be human then is to be fallen and rejected. And so, as a church at least in the evangelical tradition we countered with things as the four spiritual laws. There are many versions, I know them well I preached one form of it or another many times.

“Man was created to have fellowship with God our father; but, because of his own stubborn self-will, he chose to go his own independent way and fel-lowship with God was broken. This self-will, characterized by an attitude of active rebellion or passive indifference, is an evidence of what the Bible calls sin.

Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through Him you can know and experience God’s love and plan for your life.

He Died in Our Place and it is now the job of humanity to sign on to this confession and inherit eternal life.

Graphically it looked like this,

There is some truth here. However, while Adam was created to have fellowship with God. Apparently. all other humans are born from the start out of fellowship and if God is likened to this kind of father, I cannot help but think God is not very good. No wonder the New Atheism has so much momentum. If at birth, we are defined as outcasts by our Father it might be better to believe in no god and get on with survival. But as author Danielle Shroyer in her provocative book Original Blessing: Putting Sin its Rightful Place, states:

For reasons unfathomable to me … God has decided to stick with it (us). The animal skins God provides to clothe Adam and Eve is God sticking with it. The rainbow is God sticking with it. The covenant is God sticking with it. The exodus is God sticking with it. The wilderness is God sticking with it…Jesus is God sticking with it. The disciples are God sticking with in. The story begins with God-with-us and ends with God-with-us, and everything that happens in-between declares God-with us, including but not limited to God’s own son.” [8]

Which reminds me of another verse, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[f] a fish, will give him a snake instead?12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:11)

Again, my human parents did not wait for my consent before they started loving on me. And to this day as a father myself, neither my daughter or grandson have any control over my loving them.

If I had all this figured out, I would write a book. A blog will have to suffice for now but this I know “identity” from the start is crucial. My grandson is 7 and a half years old. Apparently, “a half” is a thing today. He lives some 2,000 km away and so opportunities to visit are limited. But after a visit I will not leave without telling him two things. First, Jameson, remember who you are. You are our special, special, special (the liturgy requires three specials) grandson and two remember whose you are. And now he finishes the liturgy, “I am a child of God.” The truth of the matter he was a child of God at the moment of conception. And God has never stopped loving on him.

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[1] Susan Nelson, Healing the Broken Heart: Sin, Alienation and the Gift of Grace (Chalice Press, 1996): 37.

[2] Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (Faber and Faber, 2012): 27.

[3] The idea of "an age of accountability" was of little help. It refers largely to other kids, it is a vehicle to console grieving parents whose young child suddenly passes away and it tries to let God of the hook for being such a curmudgeon.

[4] In keeping with Augustine later Thomas Aquinas would claim ” the original sin of all men was in Adam indeed, as in its principal cause, according to the words of the Apostle (Romans 5:12): "In whom all have sinned": whereas it is in the bodily semen, as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature transmitted to the child.” This as can be imagined has many negative residual effects on the understanding of sexuality in and out of marriage within the church.

[5] G. K. Chesterson famously insisted that original sin is the only doctrine of the Christian faith that is empirically provable.

[6] Perhaps ironically I criticized in my paper Martin Luther writings on original sin when he argued that sin not only corrupted the human race but nature as well. If Adam had not sinned grass, Luther argued, would  be greener than green. At the time I considered that a silly idea but Bill Griffin perhaps my favourite professor chastised my youthful arrogance at criticizing someone as significant as Martin Luther.

[7] Gen 4.7 Again sin here does not define a person, there appears a possibility that it can be mastered.

[8] Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place (Fortress Press, 2016) : 5,6.