Can my previous post be right? Is choice the crux of sin? Can I sin where no choice is involved?
What about this sort of case? Imagine I am brought up in a family that is deeply racist. I stew in their racism from my earliest conscious moments. I soak it up without ever realizing that I have done so and certainly without ever considering it is as wrong or even as questionable. I grow into adulthood. I choose as a racist; I act as a racist; I live as a racist. Later, I come to understand racism and to see that I myself am and have been racist. Now, one thing I come to see about myself is that I have chosen as a racist. But I don’t think that when I repent of my racism that I am repenting only for those choices. Or am I? I became a racist without choosing to do so—but does that mean that I made no choices at all in becoming one (but nonetheless need to repent); or, does it mean that I became one by making choices under a description on which they were permissible, but that I have now come to see that the choices I made also fall under a description on which they were impermissible (and so need to repent)?
Let me hazard the following. Someone once said to me that there are two dominant models for sin: sin is crime, and sin is disease. Despite what this post and my last post may suggest primus visus, if I have to choose only one of the models, I prefer the second—sin is disease. But I wonder if the truth isn’t more complicated, more mysterious: sin is somehow both crime and disease. 1 John 1: 11 comes to mind.
He that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness has blinded his eyes.
Sin is darkness—a darkness which blinds. It blinds the eyes of the person who sins, who walks in darkness. But the darkness also, I’m tempted to say, blinds the eyes of the person who tries to peer into it so as to understand it. That does not mean that we cannot identify sins, in ourselves or in others. It does mean that we are not going to be able to come up with a satisfactory “hydraulics” of sin. And so it likely also means that we should be wary of identifying sins in ourselves or others by relying on a self-fashioned “hydraulics” of sin.
Filed under: philosophy or religion
