I don't know about you, but I grow weary of sin; I (we) face an
ongoing battle every breath that we take. Whether it be perverse
thoughts, dark deep secrets that plague the conscience, actions that
result in destruction for you and all those related to you, systemic
evil that permeates the very fabric of society (this is probably most
insidious since we are conditioned by it in ways that give it a normalcy
and thus societal and then personal acceptance); the Apostle can
relate,
23But
I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,
and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
24O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Romans 7:23, 24
We
battle on. But how do we know what we battle; how do we gauge the
target, how do we even know that there is a target to hit? How do we
realize that evil isn't some just mysterious lurking principle 'out
there' that ultimately is outside of me, and not something that actually
implicates my very being to its deepest depths---even when I engage in
the evil 'out there' occasionally or situationally? How do I
know, even
if I can index concrete and ongoing instantiations of evil 'out there,
that the evil is indeed me? And that this all encompassing wickedness
and deprivation consumes my inner self, which organically shapes my
outer self---since really ourselves (body/soul) are integrated wholes.
In other words, I am sin to the depths, and the reason there is sin,
evil, wickedness 'out there'; it is mostly because it has a context 'in
here', in me. But how can I say such things, how can I ground such
assertions beyond some sort of psychological intuition? We know that we
are blind when the impression of light intensifies our darkness; when
Jesus acts the way he does, and did, we know we are indeed blind. We
come to the realization that for all our good, for all our posturing
toward ourselves; that the
next to the last word is that we live in a state of
No, or
blindness to the fact that what we see the Apostle Paul giving voice to
can only come when faced with the depth of our problem as we
participate in the life of Christ. The One who took our No, our
blindness, and indeed our sin unto himself 'by becoming sin for us that
we might become the righteousness of God in him' (II Cor. 5:21). As
Calvin so perceptively knew, we only truly have knowledge of ourselves
(and our abysmal state), when we first have knowledge of God through
Christ,
God the Redeemer.
It is this that John
Webster masterfully elucidates as he engages Karl Barth's vision of a
christologically conditioned knowledge of sin in its most depth
dimension. Let me quote Webster, who is commenting on Barth's
Church Dogmatics &
Ethics, and the moral anthropology embedded therein:
[B]arth's
Christological determination of sin is not so much an attempt to
dislocate 'theological' from 'empirical' reality, as an argument born of
a sense that human persons are characteristically self-deceived. Human
life is a sphere in which fantasy operates, in which human persons are
not able to see themselves as they truly are. The 'man of sin'
thinks
he sits on a high throne, but in reality he sits only on a child's
stool, cracking his little whip, pointing with frightful seriousness his
little finger, while all the time nothing happens that really matters.
He can only play the judge. He is only a dilettante, a blunderer, in his
attempt to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, acting
as though he really had the capacity to do it. He can only pretend to
himself and others that he has the capacity and that there is any real
significance in his judging. (CD IV/1, p. 446.)
This
theme of concealment surfaces frequently in paragraph 60 (and
elsewhere). Believing ourselves to see clearly, even allowing ourselves
to suppose our sight to be sharper than that of our fellows, we are
blind to the reality of our own selves. Barth acutely perceives that
moral earnestness frequently rests upon clouded vision and lack of
self-awareness and self-distrust. And so, once again, we return to the
Christological basis for the treatment of human sin: 'Compared with Him
we stand there in all our corruption ... The untruth in which we are men
is disclosed ... We are forced to see and know ourselves in the
loathsomeness in which we find ourselves exposed and known.'
Human
sinfulness, then, entails an ability to disentangle ourselves from our
acts in such a way that they are no longer really ours. As Barth puts it
in a passage in Church Dogmatics IV/2, we allow ourselves to believe that:
The
sinful act is regrettable but external, incidental and isolated failure
and defect; a misfortune, comparable to one of the passing sicknesses
in which a healthy organism remains healthy and to which it shows itself
to be more than equal. On this view, the individual --- I myself ---
cannot really be affected by the evil action. I do not have any direct
part in its loathsome and offensive character. In the last resort it has
taken place in my absence. I myself am elsewhere and aloof from it. And
from this neutral place which is my real home, I can survey and
evaluate the evil that has happened to me in its involvement with other
less evil and perhaps even good motives and elements; in its not
absolutely harmful but to some extent positive effects; in its
relationship to my other much less doubtful and perhaps even
praiseworthy achievements; and especially in my relationship to what I
see other men do or not do (a comparison in which I may not come out too
badly); in short, in a relativity in which I am not really affected at
bottom. I may acknowledge and regret that I have sinned, but I do not
need to confess that I am a sinner. (CD IV/2, p. 394)
These
clarifications of the forms of human self-deception (which are by no
means intended to underrate the ambiguity of the moral situation) are an
important background to Barth's treatment of original sin. His
objection to some formulations of that doctrine is, at heart, that they
are deficient in their account of positive evil. And his refusal of an
independent locus peccati, his rejection of anything other than
a Christologically determined account of sin, is directed by precisely
the same concern. Far from averting attention from evil as fact,
Christology is intended to furnish a means of clarifying our vision and
dissolving our illusions about our own moral integrity. [John Webster, Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought, 69-70.]
The
Apostle Paul concurs with this kind of assessment about the deleterious
effects of sin upon a life that knows that it only knows its true state
of affairs because of the One who
finally has given the
last word to our No-being by his
Yes to the Father for us---
viz. a Yes that is given concrete form through his death, burial, and most importantly
resurrection-ascension. The Apostle Paul, with his eyes wide open, as we noted earlier, gives a final sigh of relief when he writes:
25I
thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself
serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. Romans 7:25
The Apostle knew, that he knew sin, not ultimately because of the
Law; but ultimately, because of Christ who penetrated deeper than the Law could on its own---
viz. into
the cavernous depths of the human soul which left to itself continues
to look at evil and wickedness as if its 'out there', while all along
failing to realize that they've never even seen sin and evil and
wickedness in its most grotesque form; that's because they've never
presumed that maybe, just maybe the most insidious form of evil, in the
end, dwells where they can't peer, where they dare not, in themselves.
