This is an abbreviated version of chapter eleven of my book, ‘From a Parish Base: Essays in Moral and Pastoral Theology’. That in turn was based on two much longer pieces, Sin, Spirituality and the Secular, ( The Way, 1992, pp. 13-22) and The Changing Paradigms of Sin, (New Blackfriars, 1989, pp. 489-497). Another attempt to grapple with the topic of sin in a way which might be pastorally helpful at a practical level is found in The inhumanity of sin and the humanity of forgiveness, chapter seven in my New Directions in Moral Theology: The Challenge of Being Human (London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1992). Some of the thinking which I develop in section three below owes much to Gabriel Daly’s book, Creation and Redemption (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1988). Jack Mahoney has developed the same line much further in his book, Christianity in Evolution (Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2011). My review of Mahoney’s book follows this essay.
Christian spirituality is about answering the call of Jesus. However, Jesus has said very categorically: ‘I have come to call not the just but sinners’. Therefore, it looks as though, in some way or other, there is an essential linkage between spirituality and our being sinners.
Sometimes spirituality is presented as though it had nothing whatsoever to do with sin. At our Baptism we have renounced sin and so it is presumed that sin should play no further part in our lives. Sin is viewed as a regression. It is something we ‘fall into’. This suggests that we are falling below what is seen as an acceptable standard for Christian and human life. It is hard to reconcile this perfectionist approach with Jesus saying that he has come to call sinners. Calling sinners suggests our being called out from our sinfulness, rather than our attempting to live some kind of perfect life free from sin. This would seem to imply that our sinfulness is actually the starting point for our spirituality. In this piece I look at the link between Christian spirituality and our sinfulness from three converging directions: first, spirituality being a lifelong growth-process out of our being ‘victims of sin’; second, its being a lifelong growth process out of our being ‘agents of sin’; thirdly, grappling with the objection that ‘growth out of sin’ seems too negative a starting point for Christian spirituality. Finally, I look at the social and ecological implications of such a spirituality.
(1) Christian spirituality as a person’s lifelong process of growth out of being a ‘victim of sin’.
If spirituality is to be viewed as a lifelong process of growth out of being a ‘victim of sin’, the question immediately arises: where does each person find his or her particular agenda for this growth? In other words, how am I to discern what Christ is asking of me, victim of sin that I am?
There is a tendency to answer that question along very individualist lines. Each of us is unique. We are not mass-produced on an assembly-line. Consequently, Christ calls each of us as unique persons. Each of us has his or her unique personal vocation. Following out this approach, we try to discern in what special ways each of us is a victim of sin, since it is there that we will discover our own personal woundedness and so our own unique need for healing.
That is fine as far as it goes. However, it does not go nearly far enough. To focus on what is unique about me is to take a very partial and impoverished view of myself as a human person. An absolutely essential dimension of my being a human person is the fact that I am, always have been and always will be bound up in a whole series of relationships of interdependence with other human beings. This has enormous implications for me if I am to arrive at a full diagnosis of where my personal woundedness lies. It means, for instance, that my personal woundedness will be connected to the woundedness of other people. Obviously, this does not mean that we are all wounded in exactly the same way. Nevertheless, it does mean that my personal woundedness will be linked to the woundedness of all the significant others in my life.
Moreover, these significant others in my life will be found within an everwidening series of concentric circles – my parents, family, educators, friends and neighbours. Their woundedness is likely to have an impact on me in the various dimensions of my being a human person. For example, how I develop as a sexual and relational being will be affected by the woundedness of the people who are close to me as I am passing through the key developmental stages of my life. A United States theologian, Beverly Hildung Harrison, has brought this out very powerfully in speaking of what she calls the ‘formidable power’ of nurturing:
We have the power through acts of love or lovelessness literally to create one another … because we do not understand love as the power to acteach-other-into-well-being, we also do not understand the depth of our power to thwart life and to maim each other. That fateful choice is ours, either to set free the power of God’s love in the world or to deprive each other of the very basis of personhood and community … it is within the power of human love to build up dignity and self-respect in each other or to tear each other down … through acts of love directed to us, we become self-respecting and other-regarding persons, and we cannot be one without the other (‘The Power of Anger in the Work of Love’, in Carol Robb (edit), Making the Connections:Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, Boston, Beacon Press, 1985, p. 11-12).
My woundedness will also be influenced by the woundedness of the institutions which form part of my social existence – including the Church. Furthermore, it will also be marked, to a greater or lesser extent, by various forms of social woundedness, such as patriarchy, racial prejudice, national and cultural deficiencies, homophobia, ecological insensitivity and my belonging to a developed world whose affluence seems to be irretrievably linked to structures of exploitation.
If some or all of these factors go to make up the way I, as a human person, am a victim of sin, by that same token they should also feature on my personal agenda for ‘growth out of being a victim of sin’. In other words, they will constitute the complex medium through which the sinner that I am hears the call of Christ. This means that they will form an essential part of the agenda for my personal spirituality in my ordinary, everyday life.
If all this is true, it means that my growth out of sin cannot be something that I can achieve on my own. Nor, in fact, can it be a growth that takes place in me alone. For instance, where my woundedness is relational, the growth in healing must necessarily be relational too. Likewise, where my woundedness goes back to structural roots, growth towards healing may well demand of me some kind of personal involvement in working for structural reform. Theologically, this is a strong argument in favour of the communal celebration of reconciliation. It does not argue from convenience – lack of opportunity for individual confession due to excessive numbers or paucity of confessors. It is based on the essential social dimension of our being sinners and the corresponding social dimension of our healing and reconciliation.
Moreover, as human persons we are ‘historical’ beings. We are the product of history, we live in the midst of history and we ourselves play our own unique part in fashioning history. History is full of ambiguity. Some opportunities are seized, other are lost. Nevertheless, although Christians do not believe in inevitable progress, they do believe that God’s Spirit is present and active wherever true human progress occurs in history (cf. The Church in the World of Today, no. 26). This belief in the Spirit active within history should make us sensitive to ‘the signs of the times’. These signs of the times constitute part of the call of Christ to the historical sinful persons that we are. Through them we discern some of the growth out of sin that we are called to be part of in our contemporary world. It is significant that, when Council Fathers at Vatican II turned their attention to what was implied in being a Christian in the world of today, the very first thing they did was to try to interpret the signs of the times (cf. GS, nn. 4-10). I am convinced that a spirituality cannot be truly Christian today if, for instance, it turns a deaf ear to what the Spirit seems to be saying to us through the voices of so many committed women who are articulating the deep sufferings and injustices inflicted on their sisters by patriarchal institutions, including the Church. The same would seem to be true of the voices of those calling us to a greater ecological awareness and responsibility.
(2) Christian spirituality seen as a lifelong growth process out of our being an ‘agent of sin’.
The way we human beings bring about evil is not just to do with the consequences of our actions. It also has to do with ourselves as the agents of these actions. We cannot repeatedly act in an unloving way without becoming unloving persons. This would seem to be where the tragic link between being victims and agents of sin is located. If our capacity to act lovingly and justly has been seriously wounded, then that is likely to show in the way we behave towards others. In fact, experience seems to indicate that it is a very short step from being a victim of sin to becoming an agent of sin. This is very understandable. After all, part of the evil of sin in this sense is that it can injure and deform us as persons. That is why healing is such an urgent priority and this healing involves some sort of growth out of the woundedness inflicted on us by sin.
It would seem, therefore, that our growth out of being an ‘agent of sin’ is necessarily linked to our growth out of being a ‘victim of sin’. That is a truth which has far-reaching implications for pastoral practice. For instance, it implies that Christian spirituality needs to lay much more emphasis on the root causes of why we cause some of the harm that we do. It need to recognize the inadequacy and unreality of demanding a massive act of naked willpower (‘a firm purpose of amendment’) through which we are immediately expected to be able to cease from the wrong-doing we are involved in. Because we are so interdependent, it may well be that, for the present and while other factors remain as they are, it is morally impossible for a person to break free completely from the wrong-doing he or she is involved in. In reality, this is a fact of human life which has always been acknowledged and allowed for by wise confessors, even though they did not have the benefit of our current understanding of just how multi-dimensional and far-reaching our interdependence on each other actually is.
Commenting on the fact that many Christians are experiencing a ‘shift to an awareness of collective responsibility for individual sins, and individual responsibility for the collective sin’, Monika Hellwig notes:
Sin and conversion for these Christians are seen in a new light. The question of imputing guilt, calculating the degrees of culpability of freedom and knowledge, simply does not arise in the consciousness of such Christians. They are concerned with discerning patterns of disorientation in their society and in their own lives, without reference to the question of whom to blame. Instead their focus is on who can make a difference in the sinful situation, how, why, when and where.
They feel a certain impatience … with a spirituality much preoccupied with the quest for perfection in an introspective fashion. They have an urgent sense that the real agenda of continuing redemption is written on a far larger canvas, and that endless preoccupation with perfecting oneself and eliminating personal faults is petty and irresponsible in face of the terrible and unnecessary sufferings of vast masses of our times (‘Theological Trends: Sin and Sacramental Reconciliation, I. Contemporary Reflection on Sin’, in The Way, 1984, pp. 221-222).
I would interpret Hellwig as saying that it is not for us to judge the culpability or otherwise of people who are involved in what we consider to be wrongdoing. We do not know how minimal may be the personal resources individual people have for coping with the extreme pressures they may be under. Hence, it is not for us to set ourselves up as ‘sinless’ and demand that these ‘sinners’ overcome these pressures by an act of will which, for all we know, might be completely outside their personal capacity. Rather, the credibility of our opposition to the wrong-doing these people are involved in will depend, to a large extent, on how far we are committed to identifying and combatting the social pressures which might be part of the ‘sin’ of which these people are ‘victims’. Moreover, recognizing ourselves to be linked in interdependence with these fellow ‘victims of sin’, we should perhaps be on the lookout for ways in which our own interests might be bound up with the maintenance of these social pressures which result in these people ‘sinning’ in this way. Any such complicity on our part would reveal our shared ‘agency’ in their sinning. Maybe the words of Jesus to the accusers of the woman taken in adultery are relevant here: ‘Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.’
An example of a pastoral strategy which would seem contrary to this sobering pastoral principle might be the aggressive targetting by some sections of the pro-life movement in the United States of women entering abortion clinics. It is significant that many of the women who attended Archbishop Weakland’s ‘listening sessions’ on abortion focussed on a wide variety of social factors which resulted in many women experiencing enormous pressures to resort to abortion. Among these pressures the Archbishop’s report instanced ‘economic pressures, increased violence, feminization of poverty, consumerism, a continued male dominated society’ and it noted that these pressures weigh most heavily on the increasing numbers of women caught in the poverty trap (Full report in the Milwaukee Catholic Herald, 24 May 1990).
(3) Does ‘growth out of sin’ imply too negative a starting point for Christian spirituality?
We have seen how we can only hear Christ’s call to us to the extent that we accept ourselves as ‘sinners’. This means acknowledging that we are both ‘victims of sin’ and ‘agents of sin’. We have also looked at how these two ways in which we are ‘sinners’ play an important part in setting the agenda for our personal ‘spirituality’. This agenda is about our lifelong process of growth out of sin.
Growth is a term frequently used in discussions about human development. However, to talk of ‘growth out of sin’ might jar on some ears. It seems to assume a negative starting-point. That hardly seems in tune with how we envisage the normal processes of human growth. However, if we go back to the etymology of the Greek word for ‘sin’, ‘hamartia’, which means ‘missing the mark or the target’, we might be able to interpret ‘growth out of sin’ in a way which is more in keeping with the normal processes of human growth. The word ‘hamartia’ suggests that sin involves missing the point of life. It might help to explore that idea further.
Religious people are often tempted to think in terms of an original paradise from which we are expelled through our sin. That goes back to an interpretation of the ‘Garden of Eden’ story in Genesis chapter three, which would see this as a real, though picturesque, description, telling how sin entered into the world through our first parents. This overlooks the fact that this story is a myth which deals not with the past but with the present. The origin of sin, as people experience today and in every age, is not to be found in God but in ourselves as God’s creatures. However, Christianity does not look to the Book of Genesis for the heart of its belief. Christianity is essentially a faith centred on the person of Christ in whom the fullness of God’s unfolding revelation to us is made flesh. This means that the ‘point of life’ has only been fully revealed to us in and through Christ.
Christ reveals to us that the ‘point of life’ is the Kingdom of God. What this Kingdom means is a ‘mystery’ in the fullest sense of the word. In other words, it is something with such a rich abundance of meaning that we will never exhaust this meaning, either in the present age or in the age to come. The Kingdom is something we can have some experience of but which we can never fully comprehend. At times we may be able to say ‘This is what the Kingdom of God is like’; but we will never be able to say ‘Now I know what the Kingdom of God is all about’. The Good News of the Kingdom challenges us with the promise that being human has within it the potential for living a life far richer than we would ever have imagined possible. Jesus speaks of this abundance of life in the language of knowing and loving, our highest and most personal modes of human experience. In fact, the Bible often uses these two modes of human experience interchangeably. Put in simple Gospel terms, the point of human life is found in being known and loved by God and each other and in knowing and loving God and each other.
That is not the original state from which our first ancestors fell. Rather, it is a dream of which our earliest ancestors seem to have some inkling. However, the struggle to survive and gradually come to terms with the emergence of communal and social living meant that this dream was little more than a backcloth of hope in the midst of the harsh realities of everyday survival. Yet it was a dream that would not die. The process of evolution into humanness entailed this process of opening out to the transcendent. In God’s providence this gave humankind a growing capacity to be open to God’s self-revelation. Without such a capacity we would not have been ‘human’, we would not have been able to grasp the ‘point of life’ and the Word and Love of God could not have been made flesh among us.
I have been fumbling for words in the above paragraph. That is what happens when one tries to express the inexpressible. Nevertheless, if what I have been trying to say is basically true, however inadequately it is expressed, it throws a totally different light on the expression ‘growth out of sin’. No longer does it imply that the starting point of this growth is some God-forsaken place, some kind of morass of evil into which humankind has regressed. It suggests, rather, that the ‘point of life’ is something towards which humankind as a whole is growing in a lifelong process of interdependence in love – and the expression ‘lifelong’ here refers to the life of the whole human family, not just to the life of single individuals.
Of course, this is not meant to imply a deterministic view of human history. An essential factor in being human is that we are persons with the capacity to make free decisions. Consequently, part of the ‘mystery’ which constitutes the ‘point of human life’ is that God’s providential designs are and can only be achieved through the instrumentality of human freedom. However much people may believe in God, it pales into insignificance compared to the belief God has in people! In a recent theological discussion about how we should respond to the Millennium event, the Irish theologian, Enda McDonagh, spoke of the ‘risk of God’. His use of that phrase was pregnant with meaning. Part of it was touching on the risk taken by God in the whole process of creation and incarnation and on how that risk follows through into our human and ecclesial task of building the Kingdom of God here on earth and not simply postponing its coming to the end of time.
The ‘mystery’ which is the ‘point of human life’ operates at both the macro and the micro level. The macro level is the total history of humankind. The micro level consists in the stories of our own unique personal lives. Here too this ‘mystery’ perspective enables us to see our ‘growth out of sin’ in a much more positive perspective. The ‘sin’ out of which we are growing need not be seen as a mass of unredeemed evil which we have inherited. It is rather the shadow side of our human family’s fluctuating struggle to make the dream of the Kingdom a reality in our world.
This struggle is a story of partial success and partial failure, a mixture of heroic self-sacrificing love and narrow-minded self-seeking. It is full of the necessary human conflict involved in trying to make allowance for the conflicting claims of different individuals or groups. Each of us comes on the scene at a particular point in this ongoing story which is so full of ambivalence. Such is the complexity of our interdependence, each of us is affected by both the ebb and flow movements in the different dimensions of our being human persons. In some of these dimensions we may be predominantly ‘inheritors of grace’; in others, ‘victims of sin’ might be a more accurate description of our situation.
This admixture provides the raw material out of which we have to construct our lives. Christ calls us as ‘sinners’ to receive the gift of this raw material and to live our lives as fully as possible out of this bundle of light and shade. Growth out of sin is merely another way of describing our lifelong task of playing our minor but necessary and unique part in the ongoing story of humankind as it continues its struggle to give living shape and substance to the ‘point of life’ revealed to us in Christ.
This interpretation of spirituality has no room for a perfectionist ethic. It is too solidly based in the God-given reality of the everyday world. There is no perfect human being which we are all called to be. In a sense, morality for each of us is a personal affair. That does not mean that it is individualistic, or relative, or something we make up to suit our own convenience. Rather it is personal in the sense that it flows from the person each of us is, ‘integrally and adequately considered’. Christ’s call to me is myself, the person I am, considered in all the different dimensions of human personhood. Whether my response to this invitation is one of acceptance or rejection will be revealed in my life. The way I live my life constitutes my faith-response to God. That is true of every person who has ever lived.
This spirituality takes on board the fact that, as we gradually come to selfawareness, we discover that the person we are growing into, due to the influence of others and our own reaction to their influence, is not as fully human as we might like. The dawning of this self-understanding can offer us the opportunity for entering into the lifelong process of personal healing. Accepting as gift the wounded person we discover ourselves to be, we can try to live as fully as we can within our limitations. In trying, however haltingly, to live positively in this way we are casting our vote in favour of life. The conversion process is beginning to take shape in us. This is beginning to believe in myself, the person God has given me to become.
God wants us to be as fully human as we can. I was almost going to add ‘within our own personal and unique limitations’ but that would merely be stating the obvious. There is no other way any of us can be fully human except within our own personal and unique limitations. Some women theologians these days are helping us become more conscious that our limitations are actually our opportunities. They provide the raw material with which, in God’s providence, each of us has to work. This even implies that the precise way I am a ‘victim of sin’ will affect the way in which I grow into being more human. For instance, it should give me a sensitivity and compassion for those who are victims of sin in a similar way to myself and it should also make me appreciate the suffering caused by the inhumanity of sin in this particular dimension of human living.
Dorothy Sölle once made the comment: ‘I have noticed that people with faith all walk around with a limp!’ In other words, the scars of our healed woundedness will show. Each of us will bear our own unique scars. Like the glorious wounds of Jesus they will enhance our individual humanity. There is a kind of paradox at play here. The very experience of my woundedness and the inhumanity it brings into my life and that of others is the very stuff out of which repentance and healing is fashioned. It is a classic example of ‘felix culpa’. To experience my need for healing and forgiveness is an inescapable stage in the process of being healed and forgiven. Jesus said he did not come to call the just but sinners. He insisted that it was the sick, not the healthy, who need a doctor. Remembering that the word, saviour, means ‘healer’, if we are to believe in a Saviour (Healer), we need to experience our own need of salvation (healing). I recently came across a lovely story which fits in beautifully with this theme.
A woman used to draw water daily from a well some distance away. She would carry two large pots to be filled. One pot was cracked and so would be half empty by the time she got back home. After some months the cracked pot plucked up the courage to speak to the woman. ‘I feel ashamed! Each day you fill both of us pots with water. But since I am cracked, I am only half full by the time you get home. Isn’t that a waste of effort for you?’ ‘No’ replied the woman. ‘If you look back along the path I follow, you will see lots of beautiful flowers growing on your side. I planted flower seeds all along your side of the path. Thanks to the water leaking from you, those seeds have been able to grow into a rich variety of beautiful flowers with which I am able to decorate my home. That gives me great pleasure and is a joy to all who come to visit me.’
Maybe God has made us all cracked pots – to his greater honour and glory! As a popular song puts it, ‘It’s through the cracks that the light shines through’.
(4) The social and ecological implications of a spirituality of growth out of sin
I noted earlier how Aquinas, writing about sin in his Summa contra Gentiles, makes the thought-provoking comment: ‘God is not offended by us except in so far as we harm ourselves and others’ (III, c. 133 - my own paraphrase). Not surprisingly, a similar understanding of sin is found centuries later in his fellow Dominican, Albert Nolan. He writes: ‘Sin is an offence against God precisely because it is an offence against people … There is no such thing as a sin that does not do any harm to anyone … In the last analysis sin is not a transgression of law but a transgression of love’ (God in South Africa, London, Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1988, p. 38).
This approach to sin leads Nolan to make a statement which is at the heart of his whole presentation: ‘Sin becomes visible in suffering’ (pp. 38). After repeating this statement a few pages further on, he writes:
If one were to try to discern the new starting point for modern theology and spirituality in most of the Christian world today, one would have to say that it is suffering. The sufferings of so many millions of people on this planet are one of the most fundamental signs of our times (p. 49).
In other words, Nolan is saying that if we want to know where to find sin in today’s world, we need to look at where suffering is to be found. Although he is speaking of suffering brought about by human agency, he is not excluding suffering caused by structural or institutional factors or even, in some cases, suffering caused by so-called accidents and natural disasters. Very often such tragedies have a strong ingredient of human agency in them.
In exploring where God is to be met in today’s world, Nolan concludes that the voice of God can be heard in the suffering of the oppressed. Their suffering reveals where the need for salvation is most evident in today’s world. Following through all the causal links to the very roots of their suffering reveals to us where conversion is called for. This conversion will bring with it salvation through a changing of the oppressive relationships causing these sufferings. Radical conversion alone suffices and that entails a disowning of the oppressive system and appropriate participation in the processes needed to dismantle the system. Applying this more specifically to the apartheid situation in South Africa in 1988 (the era in which his book was published), Nolan writes: “… unless we, both white and black, face the monstrous reality of evil and suffering in South Africa, we shall not find God and we shall not hear his good news of salvation from sin (p. 57).
P.T. McCormick, in his article, ‘Human Sinfulness: Models for a Developing Moral Theology’, in Studia Moralia, 1988, pp. 61-100, writes in a similar mode to Nolan when he explores the notion of ‘cooperative’ or ‘social’ sin. Recognising that we are interdependent social beings, McCormick argues that we need to develop ‘an anthropology which transcends the limits of individualism and incorporates the insights of a growing body of evidence about the social character of the human person’ (p. 92).
Some structures which are found in the social dimension of human life can with justification be labelled ‘sinful’ – and this for two reasons. First of all, they are person-injuring. They destroy relationships based on justice and freedom and replace them by ‘oppressive political and economic systems, developing pervasive social attitudes or voices of greed, hostility, indifference and narcissism’ (p. 93). The result is what McCormick calls ‘anti-communities antithetical to the Kingdom of God’. Secondly, these structures do not exist outside of human persons willing to accept and maintain them and working cooperatively within them. It is the actual cooperative effort of the individual members of the group or society which makes up the structure itself. As McCormick writes:
Cooperation may take a number of forms and the degree of participation or responsibility may differ widely from member to member. However, systemic injustice and oppression depend upon a broad base of diverse sorts of cooperative effort (p. 93).
Moreover, part of their person-injuring character lies in the fact that they can even affect a person’s ‘core experiences of freedom and dignity’. Consequently, these sinful structures can be self-generating to the extent that people allow themselves to be conditioned into accepting them as either normal or at least inevitable and unavoidable. ‘That’s life’, as the fatalistic saying goes. Mc-Cormick puts this point well:
Members … respond to their weakened and contextualized freedom with learned patterns of behaviour which support the ongoing relationships of injustice and/or contribute to the progressive disintegration of the group. Such cycles are ongoing, incorporating new members and generations in structures of oppressive and alienating injustice (p. 94).
It could even be argued that social sin is the prime analogue of sin. If this is true, then, as mentioned earlier, the communal celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation should be seen as the most fundamental form of the sacrament because it most clearly expresses this social nature of sin and our co-responsibility for it. The liturgical directive that the fully communal Rite 3 can only be used in an emergency when there is a shortage of confessors completely misses the point of communal celebration. Because sin is primarily communal, our owning or confession of sin should normally be communal, and likewise we should recognise that it needs cooperative effort to undo or heal the harmful consequences of our sin. Such communal commitment to the forgiveness of reality is a prerequisite for our forgiveness. So our hope for and belief in forgiveness also needs to be signified and accepted communally rather than individually.
McCormick would go even further and suggest that clinging on to an individualist interpretation of sin itself constitutes a form of ‘social sinfulness’ and can be compared to the corporate blindness that Jesus challenged in the pharisees (p. 88). Moreover, an individualist interpretation of sin can even be used by groups to ‘blind themselves from a sense of sin and responsibility for the structures of injustice which they support’(p. 96). Social sin, on the other hand,
instead of positing the origin of evil in anonymous and impersonal structures, reveals how groups of persons cooperate in projecting their responsibility for and participation in systems of injustice on to such invisible and anonymous structures of violence and oppression (p. 96).
Jon Sobrino lays great stress on what he calls ‘forgiveness of sinful reality’ (‘Latin America: Place of Sin and Place of Forgiveness’, in Concilium no. 184 – Special Issue on Forgiveness pp. 45-56 at p. 46). By this he means the eradication of the structures of oppression and violence and the building of new structures of justice (p. 48). He even puts this forgiveness of reality before forgiveness of the sinner, though he should not be accused of thinking that a change of structures alone can ‘forgive reality’. As he puts it: ‘the forgiveness of reality is also a matter of spirituality … Forgiving reality means loving, loving very much’ (pp. 48-49).
Finally, creation theology has been slowly bringing home to the Church that there is another dimension of sin that we need to grow out of. This is sometimes called ecological sin. In fact, it opens our eyes to the disturbing truth that there is an ecological dimension in all sin. Humanity is bound up in an intrinsic and essential relationship of inter-dependence with the rest of creation. There are not two separate and independent ethical criteria operating in ecological issues – what is good for humanity and what is good for creation as a whole. To consider creation as a whole is to consider it as including humanity. It is to recognize humanity as creation reaching a higher level of existence, the level of personal and social consciousness. This level of existence does not constitute a breaking away from the rest of creation. Creational health remains an integral element of the good of humanity, just as does bodily health. And vice-versa. In other words, the health of the rest of creation is now dependent on humanity conducting itself in a way which befits its place and responsibility within the whole of creation. Humanity can be a cancerous growth within creation – and some ‘deep ecologists’ believe it is such already. Or it can be creation reaching out to a yet higher level of life in which it can articulate its hymn of praise and thanksgiving to its creator and reflect in its very way of living the deeply personal and holistic life of its creator. For humanity to distance itself from the rest of creation and lord it over it would be a form of alienation from an integral part of ourselves. At the moment, I believe that we are struggling to find the right language in which to articulate this ecological dimension of sin. It does not seem adequate to say that humanity is nothing more than one part among many within creation, even primus inter pares. Yet to say that is not to deny the fact that most of our ethical discourse tends to be too exclusively anthropocentric. It fails to do justice to the oneness of the whole of creation which is being revealed to us through the most recent discoveries in a whole range of scientific disciplines.
(5) Conclusion
The words of Jesus, ‘I have come to call not the just but sinners’ go hand in hand with his other words, ‘I have come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly’. The title of this chapter is ‘Saints or sinners? Towards a spirituality of growth out of sin’. I hope that what I have written above has been faithful to the Christian belief that we are both saints and sinners and that a Christian spirituality needs to do justice to both these dimensions. I have tried to show that the notion of ‘growth out of sin’ can be very helpful at a pastoral level.
Today people are fond of quoting the words of St Irenaeus, ‘The glory of God is the human person fully alive’. Perhaps, that truth might be even better expressed through the language of growth, ‘The glory of God is the human person becoming more fully alive’. A similar adaptation might even be made to the traditional phrase ‘everlasting life’. A spirituality of growth might prefer to speak of ‘becoming everlastingly more alive’.
This is the original text of my review of Jack Mahoney SJ, Christianity in Evolution (Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2011). The review appeared in a modified form in the Jesuit online website, ThinkingFaith.
I have been a fan of Jack Mahoney’s writings over many years. His The Making of Moral Theology is acknowledged as a masterpiece by moral theologians worldwide. However, the book which had the deepest impact on me was his Bioethics and Belief. In it he describes theology as ‘making faith-sense of experience and experience-sense of faith’. That has been an inspiration to me ever since. As he notes himself in the Introduction to his Christianity in Evolution, it was that insight which motivated him to undertake this major work:
Because our common human experience is being faced with a major advance in our scientific understanding of human origins, intellectual integrity invites us to place that experience alongside our past and present religious beliefs, and in the process to hope to cast light on both … the dialectical activity of submitting experience to the bar of belief and of submitting belief to the bar of experience is today a requirement of every believer on pain of leaving their experience unanchored and their belief unsubstantiated (p. xiii).
Attempting to do theology with integrity in an evolutionary context leads Mahoney to a number of conclusions which many readers may find disturbing, to put it mildly! Yet he does not pull his punches:
I further argue that trying to preserve the traditional beliefs in original sin, the fall of humanity, and the death of Jesus as an expiatory sacrifice to appease an offended God, whether these beliefs are maintained in their traditional form or are subjected to various modernizing attempts to make them more acceptable, serves only to strain the belief of believers and the credulity of nonbelievers (p.xii).
Nevertheless, Mahoney is not trying to disturb but to strengthen people’s faith. In fact, it could be argued that the line of thought he is exploring could open out completely new vistas to whatever is meant by ‘the new evangelisation’. If we believe, as Benedict XVI clearly does, that at the heart of every person is a deep yearning to discover the full meaning of who we are as human persons, Mahoney is suggesting that the only thing that will satisfy that hunger is an understanding of the truths of our faith which is able to feel at home with the truths of evolution. He stresses this with regard to the riches evolution can bring to our understanding of the central doctrine of the Incarnation.
In the evolutionary approach, the creative energy of divine being is viewed as entirely immanent within all nondivine being, welling up within it like a spring of water in the process impelling noncreated being to transcend itself progressively in a variety of ways in the course of the onward evolutionary march of God’s creative purpose. So much so that it is possible to consider that in one instance the divine presence and immanence in creative being reached such a peak of intensity that God actually became a human being, Jesus of Nazareth (p. 117).
This helps us to see Jesus as the summit of creation. I am writing this review on the Vigil of the Feast of Christ the King. The New Translation of the Missal has changed the title of this feast to Christ, King of the Universe. What an inspired choice!
Mahoney’s book is remarkable for the extensive reading and research needed to give substance to his line of argument and for the courage he displays in challenging us, in the light of evolutionary truths, to look again at some of the ways our faith has been expressed. Some more specific comments:
I found the introduction and first chapter immensely attractive and enjoyable reading. I struggled with chapter two. It made heavy reading – for me at least. I warmed very much to what he was saying about sharing in the life of the Trinity. That has come home to me more and more in the last ten years or so. No mystical experiences or anything like that, just a deep conviction. However, I am not happy with Mahoney’s use of the word ‘altruism’ for that inner life of the Trinity. It is far too bland and abstract. There is no life in it. It fails to move me with wonder and passion. It sounds like a philosophical theory rather than the red hot centre of the whole of creation, let alone the inner life of the Trinity. I’m sure the ‘love’ family of vocabulary could offer a richer and more appropriate word. The alternative Collect for Trinity Sunday puts it beautifully: ‘You reveal yourself in the depths of our being, drawing us to share in your life and your love’. The omission of that prayer from the new Missal is a sad loss.
Death and Resurrection – Mahoney suggests that an evolutionary theology:
proposes that the motive for the Word becoming flesh was not to save humanity from any inherited congenital sinfulness; it was for Christ to lead and conduct the human species through the common evolutionary fate of individual extinction to a new level of living with God. Nor was this done by the offering of Christ as an expiatory sacrifice to placate an injured God; it was achieved by Christ’s freely confronting death and winning through to a new phase of existence to be imparted to his fellow humans in their evolutionary destiny to share fully in the life of God (pp. 14-15).
Sacrifice – I have always felt very uncomfortable with referring to the Mass as a sacrifice. Sadly, I note that the term is used even more in the new translation! Nevertheless, I suspect that what Mahoney is saying on this issue will raise loads of objections.
I feel comfortable with Mahoney’s position on Original Sin, the Fall, Atonement, Justification and similar concepts which he suggests no longer sit comfortably in an evolutionary context. His description of sin in an evolutionary context is very helpful: ‘Sin emerges as humanity’s yielding to evolutionary selfishness and declining to accept the invitation to self-transcendence: it is a refusal to transcend oneself in the interests of others’ (p. 43). Put like that, it makes sense of Paul VI’s claim that ‘the world is sick’ (Populorum Progressio, no. 66) and his diagnosis of its sickness as ‘the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples’. I also liked Mahoney’s comment: ‘What people in today’s culture need most is not the recovery of a sense of sin but the acquiring of a sense of purpose in their lives’ (p. 66).
The New Translation of the Missal does not sit easily with much of what Mahoney is proposing. Its more frequent description of the Eucharist as a ‘sacrifice’, is a case in point, especially when coupled with such words as expiatory or propitiation. Some might object – what about the ancient piece of Christian wisdom, ‘Lex orandi, lex credendi’? I presume Mahoney would argue that our ‘prayers’ also have to make sense in an evolutionary age. Otherwise, we are just ‘babbling as the pagans do!’
There is another issue also linked to the new missal and the principles of translation on which it is based. To be consistent with Mahoney’s approach, rather than going back to an archaic, tired ‘more sacred’ form of words for the liturgy, perhaps a wiser criterion for translation would have been to use a form of language which combines beauty to the ear, simplicity for the tongue, richness in symbolism, while at the same time doing full justice to our understanding of the wonders of God’s ongoing creation in our evolutionary age. That would be more in keeping with the ‘new evangelisation’.
Though I can see where Mahoney is coming from, I feel uneasy about his suggesting:
The possibility that belief in hell need not continue to be maintained in an evolutionary theology if those who are not destined to enter with Christ into the new phase of rise existence will not be condemned to everlasting suffering but rather will be allowed to cease to exist at death (p. 147-148).
Finding an eternal hell of punishment impossible to reconcile with a loving God, I can see the attractiveness of Mahoney’s suggestion. However, I find Julian of Norwich’s, ‘All will be well and all manner of things will be well’, more in tune with a God of love and compassion!
I have the bad habit of highlighting passages I find particularly memorable. In Mahoney’s book, the biggest concentration of highlighting appears from p. 62 onwards, especially pp. 89-94, 115-122, 127-138, and the whole of chapter seven which is outstanding.
This book will certainly arouse a lot of discussion and there will be plenty of questions raised by some of the positions he adopts. Despite that, I believe that it is a very important contribution to the development of theology in our evolutionary age. Benedict XVI is not the only one who is showing amazing resilience in his advancing years.