Richard Rohr describes how moving beyond an emphasis on personal sin allows us to focus on larger forces at play that create systemic harm:
For some reason, the word “sin” now seems old-fashioned and no longer helpful or even clarifying in most discussions. It can send any conversation down a rabbit hole of side comments, judgments, and clarifications that derail the original direction of the conversation.
Perhaps so many of us stopped using the word because we located sin inside of our own small, cultural categories, with little awareness of the true subtlety, depth, and importance of the broader concept. As each culture and religion defined sin in its own idiosyncratic way, the word itself ceased being helpful. Instead, we simply used it to designate various taboos and cultural expectations, usually having to do with bodily purity codes. (Some Christians are into dancing and drinking, whereas others consider it almost obscene).
My assumption and conviction are that sin became a less useful idea for many of us because we needed to move around in a different field to regain our notion of the deadly nature of true evil. No one can deny that evil is very real, but what many of us now observe as the real evils destroying the world—such as militarism, greed, scapegoating of other groups, and abuses of power—seem very different from what most people call sin, which has mostly referred to personal faults or guilt, or supposed private offenses against God. These did not actually describe the horrible nature of evil very well at all. So, we lost interest in sin.
We also lost interest because we usually heard the concept of sin being used to judge, exclude, or control others, or to shame and control ourselves, but seldom to bring discernment or deeper understanding, much less compassion or forgiveness, to the human situation. In my observation, the more sin-obsessed a religion or culture became, the more unloving and cognitively rigid its people tended to be.
If we are honest and perceptive, we surely see that actual evil often seems to “dominate the very air” (a phrase found in Pauline texts such as Ephesians 2:2) and is more the norm than the exception. In fact, evil is often culturally agreed-upon, admired, and deemed necessary, as is normally the case when a country goes to war, spends most of its budget on armaments, admires luxuries over necessities, entertains itself to death, or pollutes its own common water and air. Evil seems to be corporate, admired, and deemed necessary before it becomes personal and shameable.
Sin and evil must be more than personal or private matters. Convicting people of individual faults does not change the world. I believe the apostle Paul taught that both sin and salvation are, first of all, corporate realities. Yet, we largely missed that essential point, and thus found ourselves in the tight grip of monstrous evils in Christian nations, all the way down to the modern era.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with Evil? The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (CAC Publishing, 2019), 7–11, 12.
Image credit and inspiration: Balint Mendlik, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An arrow missing the center reminds us that sin is not our essence. We may be momentarily disconnected from our true aim, but still able to center the next shot.
Story from Our Community:
The Universal Christ is a lived experience for me through my volunteer work bringing spiritual care and accompaniment to men living in federal prisons. I meet Christ in them—in their suffering and their longing to be restored to community and their own goodness. Through them, I have come to better understand the endless breadth and depth of God’s mercy, forgiveness, and love. Having been a victim of harmful actions myself, I know that it’s not “I” who is now able to love this way. It is Christ who has graciously come to live in me.
—Rosalie S.
