The Entire Thought

The Story of Sin

Paul tries to trace sin back to its source. But if sin is essentially a private, internal decision for evil, how could anyone possibly know how it happened for the very first time? Christianity is not dismayed by time and space. It places the origin of sin beyond earth and above mere mortals, in the hearts of angels.

In fact, scripture may not be much interested in angels at all; this may simply be a way to explain how sin happened to humans. The story of the original sin, too, is told in mythical form. The time, the place, the kind of sin are irrelevant, and we don’t have to believe in talking snakes. The point of the story is that sin is a free choice.

Having departed this far from the literal meaning of scripture, some thinkers dare to go further — from myth to psychology. They say that this describes the way human beings go from childish innocence to adulthood. We grow up by making mistakes. These psychologists say that the story of the Fall also describes the way humankind developed from ignorant beasts to wise humans. They think it was precisely through the first sin that the first human beings dared to take responsibility for themselves and declare their independence from God.

This sounds like a marvelous interpretation. It makes us feel adult and modern and wise and
independent and daring. We are willing to accept the responsibility of sin and the burden of guilt as long as it makes us feel like heroes sinning for a good cause. Sin, not truth, sets us free!

The storyline, though, does not support such fantasy. The story of the Fall clearly sees sin as a bad thing, an enslaving thing, something that has harmful consequences for humans.

Let’s look at the story again. It appears as though the original humans did not know what sin was
because there was as yet no sin to know. The tempter implies that they have to do wrong to know the
difference between right and wrong.

But this was surely not true. God clearly told them not to do a certain thing. They had a choice to obey God or not. So they had to know that it was right to obey God and wrong to disobey him.

Then what knowledge was the tempter offering? What could sin teach them that they didn’t already know? The answer is in the word “know.” To us, knowledge is an impersonal matter, a matter of the mind. But for biblical people, knowledge was an affair of the heart. When scripture says that Adam knew Eve, it doesn’t mean Adam casually met Eve at a party.

Biblical knowledge is not impersonal fact. It is an intimate experience of something in our deepest
being. When we know something, we take it into our essence — it becomes part of us. That is how Adam knew sin. Until he actually did wrong, sin was a piece of objective information, but when he freely chose evil, sin became an intimate experience. And it showed: Scripture reports that Adam became ashamed.

Shame is hard to hide. Except for sociopaths, it is an automatic response to feeling ill at ease. It may not indicate guilt, but in the Fall, shame was the immediate, obvious effect of sin. But if sin becomes too large a part of us, too much of who we are, then we don’t even have the decency to be ashamed.

Fr. James Smith
Celebration, June 22, 2008

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