Not quite – it has to do with the human want to put one’s own self above other selves.
it is the separation of the self from God that is the cause of the problem. As long as we remain under the authority of God we can not sin. As soon as you have several selfs there is conflict to be expected.
Israel remained under the authority of God and sinned, as has every human being ever who’s been under the authority of God, with one exception. Our thoughts might not be aimed to doing wickedness all the time, but as an apostle notes somewhere we aren’t even able to know all our sins, and if we can’t know them we’re not likely to avoid them.
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so do you think God submits us to suffering or would it be the devil that submits us to suffering? As Jesus has shown us, If you re one with God you can overcome the worst suffering of all.
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happy new year everyone
with living under ones authority I meant doing the will of that authority. Their troubles came for not submitting /acting out said authority.
edit:
I see sin as the point of rejecting the authority of God. In the case of the fall this is represented by eating from the tree of the “realisation” of good and evil, which could refer to “understanding” as well as “making it become reality”.
Interesting discussion. I’m at a place in my faith life – and in life in general – where I’m just tired of fearing penalties. There has to be more than this to a relationship with the Creator. Recently, I found material on Franciscan theology, and it resonated with me immediately.
It talks about not putting sin and evil at the conceptual and functional center of the human/Creator relationship…in effect, making it the “driver” and defining factor. Rather, this view puts love at the center of the relationship. Not contending there’s no sin and evil, but shifting the emphasis. This is, I think, in line with the larger Franciscan idea that God would have come to be with us even if there had been no “sin…” because God so wants to be with us. Emmanuel – God With Us. Perfect for Christians who celebrate the 12 days of Christmas, and perhaps also appealing to others who are earnestly seeking a view of God different than what they might have learned as children.
I also admire Franciscan theology’s respect and love for the natural world, and seeing humans as part of it.
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I think the above ideas are one of the reasons I resonate with so much of Richard Rohr’s stuff - his Fransiscan flavor (or Christ-like flavor, rather!) shining through in everything he promotes.
I know the feeling. It can be a huge burden lifted when one stops agonizing about all the ways they fall short, and starts to focus more on trust and God’s love instead.
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however it does require repentance of our sin and changing us in the awareness of it. It is not about “okay, its all fine”
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Marvin, I sometimes see what is called “the fall” as humans trying to be like God…to – in eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – have bitten off more than they could chew, and then needing help. Maybe this idea falls under the general definition of concupiscence? – desiring or grasping for too much…to be god-like. (For me, concupiscence in this larger sense has nothing to do with sexuality).
And I wonder too if this “fall” had less to do with “disobedience” as we normally think of it (a child and parent) and subsequent “punishment” for it…but can be regarded as a result of our nature as developing, learning beings…and then needing the loving God to guide us as we live. And, as a flowering in the fullness of what we know as time – subsequent to a more ancient way of understanding God – Jesus came to help us understand God’s true and full nature as a Lover of humankind (with all implications of true love). One who will be with us throughout our lives; help us be with others lovingly; and One with whom part of us will continue to be after the expiration of our physical bodies.
This view is of course full of holes in logic and departs from orthodoxy, looked at in a wider frame! But I think it’s my hope. I can no longer make much sense out of the “original sin” and related concepts of an orthodox faith (as it’s often explained), after having lived the better part of a human life LOL!
I have never read all of Genesis and have never even studied the first few chapters. I see it as wisdom literature – as a human explanation for how and why “unwholeness” and evil and hardship and even physical death came to be.
And one of the things about wisdom literature is that it spurs us to use the hearts and minds God gave us…to bring more wisdom and more love (the demanding kinds), in addition to the story itself. If we understand the beginning of Genesis in this way, doesn’t it bring us to a place of humility from which to grow? Help us understand ourselves (limited but with lots of potential) and God (Lover) better? Just some thoughts. Messy! 
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Merv, Yes, yes, and yes!
I so want to conceive of repentance as turning – re-thinking (penser, to think) – toward the loving God, and not as wearing a virtual hairshirt…psychologically and emotionally torturing myself or even trying to “make up” for destructive or unloving things I’ve done. Hating the badness in myself. I grew up with this way of approaching Christian faith and want to leave it behind. Shift the emphasis to what one is turning toward, being invited toward…and not what one is turning away from. Wouldn’t a prophet like John the Baptist – one recognized and praised by Jesus – essentially be inviting his hearers, and not just warning them? Any preacher who truly wants to attract people knows this, no? Offer something real and compelling. Not just evoking fear and punishment.
It’s not, with this new conception, that everything is okay. No. Maybe it’s more looking toward what is Good, and feeling drawn and spurred by this Good – rather than continuing to gaze at badness within. Be honest about what’s there, but don’t stare at it. This is just another way of letting it drive me.
That is what repentance is. And it will be good news for us when we finally see our sin and brokenness as God does. My problem is, I can’t see it that way. Not yet anyway. I’m still too attached to way too much stuff of various sorts that I have trouble entirely letting go of it or just trusting God with it. I can stew about that and about my inability to get myself to want the right things (echoing Paul’s own commiserations in Romans 7), or I can make at least a few halting practice steps of my own - learning to trust Christ more and more, and realizing that it will never be about what I can do in that regard, but will always be about what Christ has already done for all of us. It’s already a given that I will fail, but what I’m not given leave to do is to stop at least trying and responding to that love. It is a kind of striving - yes. But not striving to “do it all” for myself much less anybody else. But more a response to God’s love and wanting to become a better receptacle and mirror for that love. At least that’s the way I see it.
Happy new year!
-Merv
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It’s so nice to start the New Year with sympathetic souls and minds! Happy 2024.
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sounds like a bit of wishful thinking here.
First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English repenten, from Old French repentir, from re- re- + pentir “to feel sorrow ” (from Latin paenitēre “to regret, be sorry”; see penitent)
A lot of us want a God that does just cuddle us and tells us its okay and it wasn’t really that bad with that little bit of sin. We want to be God like as being in ultimate authority of our self, that what original sin is all about, not God like as in Jesus to give up the self for the benefit of others, to let go of the self and therefore to eternally live on in the many. The wish of wanting to be eternal “selfs” is what gets us into hell the eternity that is in death when we are not ready to let go of the self.
how do you show your repentance if not by denouncing that which you recognise for being bad? To admit ones guilt and to help to help prevent others from falling for the same sins one has recognised in oneself. After all. love is not to say “its fine” but to help to prevent others from defiling themselves
I don’t think of God as cuddling (or coddling) us. Rather, I agree with the writer Annie Dillard, who said that Christians should be wearing crash helmets!
I do think, though, that our understandings of God can change and grow over time. And I don’t think guilt- and fear-motivated faith – and faith based on being “right” – is the truest kind. Do many of us who correct others, or admonish them, however politely and caringly, really have a motivation to keep them out of “hell?” Or do we want to be right, feel we are following the rules, and hope to be rewarded for doing so? Maybe? I do think that some personalities have a greater need for structure and certainty than others, thus affecting how they see faith, God, and human action.
Fortunately, there’s gracious room here for a range of opinions. Am so glad about that!
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The word for “knowledge” is the same that would be used of sexual intercourse; it isn’t just head knowledge but experiential.
There are some awesome lectures on YouTube – I’m thinking of Dr. Michael Heiser here – that give perspective on the legalistic view of the Torah and how that really isn’t what Torah meant, that the Torah got twisted due to the Exile and went from being guidance to being violations and punishment. Dr. Heiser traces through the Old Testament and shows that the Torah was supposed to nudge the people towards greater mercy, etc., and it functioned as guidance for God’s earthly family. It strikes me that we should recognize that it’s about family given Jesus’ use of “abba” in the New Testament, but we are so oriented towards a “grading” system that is performance based and that serves to filter out the concepts that come with family – it prompts us to think about earning God’s approval rather than pointing us to God’s intention to gather us all back into His family.
[Indeed this links to the whole ‘faith v works’ conflict since the entire argument boils down to whether works are meritorious in some way – and it makes that controversy seem silly since being in God’s family means conforming to the meaning of that family.]
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Another view of sin and the fall is that all sin is an attempt to obtain what God wants for us but doing it wrong.
I did a chapel talk at university where I looked at the difference between working to turn your back on sin and working to stay focused on God. One point I made is that if we’re all turning our backs on whatever sin is bugging us we will be all over the place in our lives’ directions, but if we focus on sticking close to God then we’re all aimed at a common goal . . . and sin will get dealt with along the way.
One of my professors told us that the entire Old Testament is about people falling on their faces due to screwing up, so if we actually pay attention to it we’ll know that we are going to fall flat on our faces, too – and God in a sense doesn’t care. In fact falling on our faces is a good way to keep on mind that we need a Savior, so as James says we should “count it all joy”.
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That comes from regarding God as the guy on the scoreboard racking up our failures – of course we’d prefer the cuddly God! But that isn’t who God is; He’s not a scorekeeper tallying our mistakes, He’s a Dad walking along as we learn to ride our spiritual “bicycle”, waiting to help us back up and get trying again.
That fits so well with my bicycle analogy!
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St. Roymond: Very interesting points here – thank you. I have long wondered about most of us Christians’ understanding of the Torah and the entire OT and whether, if this were better, it could illuminate how we read the NT and understand Jesus. Will make a point to look for Dr. Michael Heiser.
Also wonder often if the many of us who, for various reasons in childhood, were made to feel “bad” and guilty, and how this makes the view of an exacting, sin-counting, punishing God so repugnant. And which leads to great longing for a God who loves us as we are and wants to guide us to greater capacity for love, growth, giving.
And, as mentioned above, how focusing on my sins rather than giving and receiving love invariably leads to avoidance of the real God who waits patiently for me: the one to whom C.S. Lewis said he wanted to pray…not to an imaginary God but to the God who God knows [himself] to be.
Connecting back to those of us who feel more comfortable with a “rules-based” (for lack of a better term) faith life and relationship with God: I often notice that my early learning and my preconceptions – while sometimes necessary and useful – can obscure encounters with the “real” God. The God who is both “abba” and infinitely mysterious…whose Self and creation are right in front of me on ordinary days, and not “up” in the sky somewhere, or impossibly beyond me. A friend once said I should put down the theology books and catechism and develop a personal sense of God’s presence and nature. I think he was right! It can be a delicate balance, but one so worth aiming at.
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Yes! This makes me think of Catholic friends who sometimes say they want to be saints…and a quote about this being life’s only worthy goal. Yikes! For myself, I feel if I’m concerned about becoming a saint, I’m preoccupied with myself and my own standing, and not tending enough to God and others. Just a thought. I’ll leave this to others, as my face has been flattened for a long time from excessive falling! 