BY DR. AGONSON

Sin

In a class project covering Humanity and Sin, I was dissatisfied with the final compromise: I do not think we agreed on what was at the heart of sin. So, what is sin? the textbook said good, if at times esoteric, things on the subject, but I found it dry reading as compared to the informative narrative of Genesis. One aspect of that story I want to consider as regarding the nature of sin is the element of truth present in the deceitful words of the serpent. Adam and Eve did not die, at least not as was expected, and even God ‘agrees’ with the serpent at the end of the chapter, proclaiming that man had become like God.

Obviously, the narrative is showing sin as rebellion against God, but the simplicity of that statement does not account for the entirety of this brief story. Let us consider, then, another story, a fiction but not a fiction, concerning two students: They each, let us say they are studying theology, must take similar courses, and certainly have little choice regarding large portions of the set curriculum; however, in those generous areas called electives, the two students happen to make the opposite choices, the first by choosing the easiest classes, sometimes referred to in the vulgar language as an easy A, and the second by choosing classes on the somewhat philosophical grounds that he desires knowledge. Furthermore, wherever the first sees a choice between two professors teaching the same course, he will pick the one known to be the easiest, and the second, in a similar situation, will pick the one known to be the better as regards an ability to train a student. Both of them, when comparing their courses, will think the other foolish. The first might say to his companion, “What have you done to yourself, taking such and such a class? Do you not know how much work you’ll have to do, and done, probably receive for your great effort a lesser grade than if you had simply taken an easier course?” The second I imagine would reply, “What have you done in taking this professor? Do you not know that in this brief life such a professor will waste your time, for instead of learning anything, you’ll spend the next three months passing a class in which the only criteria for an A grade is showing up?”

They have, in my story, different goals, different ideas of what is good and bad. I do not judge either at this moment. The point is that on what they deem valuable, they have each made rational decisions, and on their own perspective, they find each other’s decision foolish. They are in disagreement, but if they were to lay the facts out, as regards mere facts, they would be in full agreement. To hint at what I am getting at, the serpent doesn’t seem to lie as regarding the facts, for Adam and Eve live, though death would come as a result of their choice, and even God says that in eating the fruit man had become like God.

Why is it rebellion against God, why is it sin, to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? I think, then, it is very much like the story I presented: In grasping that fruit, in claiming that knowledge in ourselves instead of in God, we ‘create’ goods which are not good and evils which are not evil; the disagreement between the two students was in their goals, in what they considered good. The story I told is not a moral story: I could imagine each student, having set their different goals, being morally upright people, but when talking about good in the sense of a moral good or evil, and not in the sense of scholastics, we see that similarly there has to be an ultimate goal, morally speaking.

Sin seems to have two aspects, the failure to reach this aforementioned goal, but also a failure to even realize the proper goal. It is one thing to shoot at a target and miss, but it is another to aim purposefully at the wrong target, especially if someone, instead of aiming at his enemies, begins to aim at his friends.

What is sin? It appears to me the loving of something lesser as if it were the greater, of taking smaller goods and placing them above greater goods, and in its seminal moment within Eden, it was the choosing of oneself over God. Is it any wonder, then, the horror our progenitors had in their exposed nakedness proceeding this action? What is nakedness and clothedness if not a realization of our own vulnerability, the realization that we are not God though we have made ourselves God, that we do not measure up to the position we have grasped, and being clothed, a merciful act to hide this great shame? “Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?” (Nietzsche).

Returning to my story, we now must compare the two student’s goals: The first wants, it seems, to graduate and wants good grades; the second, on the other hand, wants knowledge. If asked, would not the first hold that his diploma was a greater thing than the knowledge it supposedly represented, and the second, would he not say that the knowledge itself was greater than the recognition of that knowledge? Here, though I would not place knowledge as the ultimate moral goal, can it not be seen that the first has loved the lesser thing, in fact, he has confused the image of the thing for the thing itself? Was man not the image of God, and did they, the man and woman, not choose their own godhood, that ability within them to be like God, over the actual God?

So, in our group, I do not think we fundamentally agreed as to what sin was, what it means to rebel against God, and so I feel that our project left out much which can be said regarding sin, namely the aspect of sin which is corrupted love. Our relationship with God is broken, and instead of loving Him as we ought, we love things more than we love Him.

Death

And what would be more natural following a discussion of sin than a discussion of death? (I’m just such an optimistic guy.) While researching Last Things, I found myself very interested in the fact that in our textbook there was a chapter devoted to personal eschatology, one of the most wonderfully erudite ways of saying death I’d ever seen.

I, considering personal experience, strongly suspect that if men were to consider their death they’d be better people. I am not yet even speaking of the judgment to come. What is the final thing the spirits show Ebenezer but his death? Is he enticed with Heaven or threatened with Hell? No, for he had made money his greatest aim only to discover what gain such gains were to a corpse. What is it Socrates says of his own profession but that philosophy is a preparation for death? So, I proclaim that a wise man should say, “Memento mori,” for in a sense, without facing death we cannot know God.

Now, I have, this past week, been on a personal study of Genesis, specifically creation. As the Bible opens, God makes the light, and he separates light from darkness, calling the one day and the other night. However, what I found interesting was that there was already darkness. There is no mention of God creating darkness, for seemingly before He creates, darkness is “over the deep,” a phrase paralleling God’s presence over the water.

Now what am I to say? Is darkness some primordial thing, uncreated and eternal? Perhaps this is so, but I think a different interpretation may suffice. When God creates light, he also must seemingly separate the light from the darkness, He must, as it were, now that there is light, define light by its opposite, must say, this is light and this is not light. So, though it may be reasonable to say that darkness was before creation, on a wholly different level, the very concept or category in which darkness could exist was not until God divided the day from the night.

Why am I mumbling about light and darkness? Surly I’m not also going to tie this into the Gospel of John’s connection between light and life, and therefore connect these meditations on the nature of darkness to the nature of death?

Anyway, death seems much the same as darkness. Did God create death? The book of Genesis does not say, but going off of John’s opening where light and life are seemingly equated, or are at least strongly related, is making the parallel connection between darkness and death inordinate?

God certainly is the creator and source of life, of existence, but what of the opposite, from where comes death? Why is it that Paul speaks of death as the last thing placed under Christ’s authority, and in the same chapter, what is Paul telling the Corinthians when, rejoicing that death has no more sting, he declares that the sting of death was sin? Sin, as I have heretofore considered, is rebellion against God, but more so, that rebellion is broken love, is when the ordinate object of love, God, is usurped by something lesser. What was it which introduced death but sin? In rebelling against God, we rebelled against the very source of life; and in loving the lesser object, what was life made but futility? Or is that not the complaint of the Preacher when he declares “Vanity, vanity”?

Death, the opposite of life and the result of sin, the ultimate foe which could not comprehend the light, is the opposite of God, is separation from Him. In the same manner light was defined, in the same way it was separated from darkness, so God too, in being defined, logically is separate from what He is not. So death is, in this sense, the greatest enemy, and is rightly the last enemy to become subject to Christ. So, I consider what Christ says to Nicodemus, how judgement is described, that light came into the world and men loved darkness rather than light. In the end, it is light or darkness; one either loves the light or is condemned to darkness. Death’s power is sin, and that not only because through sin death came into the world, but also that through sin, through hating the light of God, we are dead.

So, I think the wise should consider death and darkness, and like old Ebenezer Scrooge, we should consider what is worth loving in this life, whether the things of darkness leading to death, or the things of light leading to God.

“God is light, and in Him is no darkness.” 1 John.