You probably have heard the Bible story about how sin came into being. The Lord God created the world, then the garden in Eden, with its many trees "pleasant to the sight and good for food." In the middle, he put the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Then God created Adam and told him not to eat of that particular fruit "for the day that you eat of it you shall die."
When God created Eve, things went a little awry. Eve apparently knew about God's command and that it applied to her as well. They were not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But the serpent beguiles her into disobedience, saying that knowledge and wisdom, not death, would be her reward. And that she would be like God, knowing good and evil. Not such a bad thing, Eve thought. She ate the beautiful and delicious fruit and got Adam to eat, too. Then, according to the scripture, "the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loin cloths for themselves."
In the evening, when God came for his usual stroll in the garden, the couple heard his footsteps and hid themselves. Of course, God being God soon finds out that they've eaten the forbidden fruit. He asks Adam why. Adam quickly blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. So God punishes them all, the serpent, the woman and the man. The serpent loses his legs and must crawl on his belly. The woman must suffer in childbirth and be ruled by her husband. The man must work hard for his food, by the sweat of his brow.
The UU minister Fredric Muir wrote that Christianity took the story in Genesis and changed its meaning. He said, "for Hebrews what Adam and Eve did was not sinning so much as simply growing up they were learning that life was not only about the comforts of paradise. The Garden story was all about cheyt, the Hebrew word meaning 'to miss the mark,' which was their definition of sin." Adam and Eve had simply missed the mark and needed to try again. That was part of life.
But "Christians took a different slant on it‹Christians went and made it personal, as if it was an affront to God. ... Christians dogmatized sin, which reminds me of a story: An Eskimo encountered a missionary priest after morning mass and asked, 'If I had not known about sin, would it have been necessary to be saved?' 'Of course not,' the priest told him. 'Then why did you tell me?' replied the Eskimo."
I had a pretty good childhood. I went to Sunday school in a Reform Jewish temple in the Boston area. There I heard some bible stories, including the story about Adam and Eve. But sin was not a big part of my religious vocabulary.
Once a year during the Jewish High Holy Days, we were urged to atone for our sins. Basically a sin for me at that time was any bad thing I had done to people I knew... a family member, schoolmate or neighbor. On the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we were supposed to think about any and all the bad thing we had done, atone and ask for forgiveness from people and from God. On the day of Yom Kippur itself, we were supposed to fast until sunset. According to traditional Judaism, this was when God decided whether or not Jews would be inscribed for a blessing in the Book of Life. It was a time for turning and renewal. A once-a- year confession with no priest involved. A one-day Ramadan fast. That was it! Not bad.
Thoughts of sin or about the evils of sinning didn't pre-occupy my everyday life. Nor that of my other friends, as far as I knew. The theology of my liberal religion stressed the goodness within us all. Yes, this time before the cultural revolution of the 60's was conservative and sexual promiscuity was not tolerated. You were either a good girl or a bad girl and things were really tough on the "bad girls." But I lived in blissful innocence.
I guess I was lucky as a youngster. To me the world was a benevolent place, at least in the mid 20th Century in Newton, Massachusetts and in America. I thought the people around me were basically good folks. And I thought sin and evil were "over there" in Europe, in Germany, where the Nazis a decade ago had killed some of my relatives people my parents and I never knew. And evil was also down South, where I learned in the 1960's that white people carried the virus of racial prejudice and did some pretty awfully things to black people. But sin and evil lived far from me. I was a naïve, a bit Pollyanna-ish, I will admit. But it was partly the times and partly how my parents protected me.
The concept of Original Sin was foreign to me, for it was (and is) a Christian doctrine. I first learned about this dogma in my college Freshman English class. My first writing assignment was to discuss the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. What was Eve's sin? And did she have a choice in the matter? I had a little trouble with the assignment, since sin wasn't discussed much in my house. And I had trouble understanding the importance of the question. So Eve was disobedient to God (like any normal adolescent) and ate a piece of fruit from the wrong tree and caused Adam to do the same. What was the big deal? She was only being human, hungry, curious and a bit rebellious. That was a part of growing up, right?
I thought the whole situation was stacked against Eve anyway. She was innocent, just born from Adams' rib, and was beguiled by that clever serpent. She believed his word that God would never find out. And when God did find out about her transgression, like any morally immature person, Eve evaded responsibility and blamed the serpent. And Adam blamed Eve. I thought that at least they ought to have been given a second chance and not thrown out of Eden. It was only their first offense. Geez! I don't remember what I said on that English paper, but I don't think I got a good grade.
I learned later that it was a big deal. I learned about the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. In case you aren't familiar with this, it's the idea that human beings were incapable of redeeming themselves because they were inherently sinful. This was due to the misdeeds of these first ancestors, Adam and Eve. And it was only through Jesus' sacrifice through his death and resurrection that we have any hope of our personal redemption from sin... and of being saved from death or hell (depending on what church you might go to). Being pretty much a humanist and a theological liberal, I was rather stunned by this gloomy, depressing doctrine.
I learned later, after reading the New Testament, that this wasn't what Jesus preached. It was Paul (St. Paul to Christians) who dreamed this doctrine up after Jesus' death. Paul's ideas were spelled out in his letter to the Romans. (Curiously, Paul focused on Adam's sin, not Eve's. I guess as a woman, she didn't count for much in his eyes.) Paul's pre-occupation with sin and death changed the whole focus of religion from the Jewish one of trying to live a good and virtuous life, to the Christian one of sin, suffering, death and damnation.
Calvinist orthodoxy carried on this grim view. Humanity was inherently depraved and only faith in God could save us. And the standards for our Puritan forerunners became stricter. Even if you didn't actually do anything wrong, your thoughts condemned you! As if we can control our very thoughts, even our subconscious! Illness and misfortune, even storms, floods and volcanic eruptions, were seen as God's punishment for sin. Judgment was harsh. Guilt and repression ruled. And, yes, I know this continues today in the Bible Belt and in fundamentalist churches.
Then along came the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and a more liberal view of the nature of God and the nature of humans. Biblical scholars read Genesis with more objective eyes and saw there was nothing in it about Original Sin. There was nothing about condemning the children of Adam and Eve, all of humankind, to death or eternal hell. A liberal interpretation of the bible in general blossomed in the 18th and 19th Centuries in America, especially among our Unitarian and Universalist foremothers and forefathers.
Liberal Christian preachers talked of a loving God, a father who wants us to do well. Instead of focusing on humanity's sinful nature, they spoke of the spark of the divine, the God-like quality that dwelt within each of us. In 1828 the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing gave a famous sermon on human nature called "Likeness to God." These clergy drew inspiration from the Hebrew Bible, including these lines in Psalm 8: "What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor." (Psalm 8:4-5, NSRV)
In an optimistic spirit, they focused on the potential of all people to fully develop their best qualities, to become good, loving and contributing members of society. They said humans possess reason and conscience and free will. If only we are nurtured and educated in the proper manner, we would become all we could be. And society would evolve, becoming better and better. Poverty and disease, ignorance and crime would eventually all disappear and the kingdom of God would be here on earth.
The Unitarian minister and social reformer James Freeman Clarke expressed this theological belief in ringing words. He affirmed a belief in "the progress of mankind onward and upward forever." There was no upward limit, apparently, of where we could go and what we and the world could become. I say thank God and Hallelujah for the liberation of liberal religion.
Let's hark back for a moment to Adam and Eve eating that forbidden fruit and seeking knowledge. This act could be seen as a good thing after all, even if it meant disobeying a divine commandment. At last, human beings were freed from the yolk of unquestioning obedience and irrational fear. They could stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. And the new philosophy of the social gospel said we could reform our social institutions and make the world better.
Many folks who heard the liberal preachers felt relieved of that awful burden of guilt and fear. The liberal message was very life affirming and comforting. It accentuated the positive... and very nearly eliminated the negative. There were many converts, particularly to the more welcoming Universalist churches, after the Civil War.
"But wait," you might say. "What about evil? What about sin? We might not believe in the serpent or in Lucifer or in the doctrine of Original Sin. But don't sin and evil exist? How are they acknowledged in liberal religion? Or is this just a religion for the comfortable middle class?"
With the First World War, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism in Europe, the mood changed. No longer were people so optimistic, so buoyant about the future and about human nature. A new and hard reality set in. And liberal religion took it on the chin for being weak in standing up to evil. James Luther Adams was a brilliant Unitarian minister and professor in social ethics who met this challenge. He spoke about the tragedy of the human condition. We're capable of great good and great evil. The same human creative power is at work in either case. In order to counteract the great forces of social evils, we need to purposefully commit ourselves to moral and social progress, and not just trust in a kind of natural evolution. We need to band together in voluntary associations in order to be effective in the world, in order to counter-balance the forces of reaction and the forces of hate, greed and narrow self-interest.
Fredric Muir writes that sin is a still a significant concept for religious liberals, but it needs to be somewhat reframed. I think that we as human beings are capable of what one might call Unoriginal Sin. By this I mean something different from the sinful, depraved nature which orthodoxy says we inherited from Adam and Eve. It is the sin which may or may not be newly created by each person and in each generation.
I like Muir's definition. To him, "Sin is anything that I do that isolates, ostracizes, or separates me or others from the human community (and by extension, from the web of life) which results in robbing or denying human uniqueness and potential. Call it evil or flawed behavior; call it missing the mark; call it brokenness; call it denial, repression, or reaction formation‹it's all sin if it separates, ostracizes, or isolates us from the ground of our being, from that which defines us as human beings. Sin is behavior that prevents a person from living out their potential for human being-ness."
How do we deal with our sins, our brokenness? I say not by "giving oneself over to God," but by turning inward to the deeper self: by self examination, by delving into the subconscious through meditation and prayer, by going through psychotherapy or group therapy, by participating in self-help groups. These are the paths to salvation. Adam and Eve's sin wasn't eating the fruit. In fact, not eating the fruit would have been a sin a denial of their potential. Their sin was in ostracizing and isolating themselves by not taking responsibility for what they had done. We know the story in Genesis is a myth. Yet it represents an age-old problem of human irresponsibility and misuse of free will. As human beings, we are going to fail often to live up to our ideals, to commit sin, to miss the mark. That's a given. But this does not excuse us from the quest.
Despite our human failings, may we keep on trying to live up to our highest human potential. May we accept with compassion our own weaknesses... and those of others. May we know that we are supported by those people who care for us and by the powers of the universe in our never-ending quest for wholeness and connection.
May it be so. Amen.
Suzelle Lynch, "The Gift of Sin" in Quest, September 2007. The monthly newsletter of The Church of the Larger Fellowship.
Fredric John Muir, "Sin" in Heretics Faith; Vocabulary for Religious Liberals. 2001 (City and publishing company unknown.)
Paul Rasor, Faith Without Certainty; Liberal Theology in the 21st Century. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2005.