Into the Wilderness: Understanding the True Nature of Sin

By Kenneth Swanson

No one is free from the struggle with sin. Not only is sin part of being human, but the true nature of sin is widely misunderstood. Into the Wilderness provides a unique interpretation of sin as a basic self-absorption that grips every human being and is the source of unhappiness. Historically the notion of sin has been divided into easily understood categories. The traditional approach used the Seven Deadly Sins--pride, greed, gluttony, anger, envy, sloth, and lust--as a framework. But a deeper understanding of sin demands three additional categories: fear, dishonesty, and despair.
Into the Wilderness explores these ten specific sins with power and clarity. The book goes beyond an analysis of sin by opening the path from sin to redemption, from unhappiness to joy, finally laying out a path from the despair of sin to the joy of spiritual renewal and freedom. The book concludes with an addendum which answers the book's fundamental question--how can one move from the enslavement of sin into God's redeeming grace? The addendum presents a detailed prayer discipline designed to open the way forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Dec 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385204069

Kenneth Swanson

Kenneth Swanson is an Episcopal priest and was in parish ministry for fifty years. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, and is the author of numerous articles on the history of religion, theology, spirituality and social ethics as well as three books. Dr. Swanson is on the faculty of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and teaches spiritual formation for the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta. He has an extensive ministry in spiritual direction.

Book preview

Introduction

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (

1

John

1

:

8

)

The Human Condition

Human beings are not happy, but most of us stay so busy we are not always conscious of just how unhappy we are. We fill our days and nights with work, family and social obligations, recreation, and the pursuit of pleasure, all in an attempt to cover up our ill-ease. Much of the time we are successful at this, but only temporarily, because at the very center of our being we suffer from a basic discontent. This is why Blaise Pascal wrote that no person is comfortable being alone in a room¹. When there are no distractions—when there is nothing to capture our attention, when we are alone with ourselves—we become conscious that something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

Across history the causes of human unhappiness have been described and analyzed, every facet from every angle: spiritual, philosophical, political and psychological. Some of these explanations are so complex and arcane they can only be understood by a tiny coterie of specialists trained in particular academic disciplines. Other descriptions are more accessible and straightforward. For example, the biblical vision of the human condition is simple, clear and unequivocal. It claims our unhappiness is caused by sin.

How many people in our society would be tempted to stop reading right here? Sin? Are you kidding? Who can accept that?

I recall an exchange that took place in an adult Sunday school class I was teaching at the Hollywood Congregational Church in Los Angeles, a half century ago in the autumn of 1973. I am not a sinner, an elderly parishioner said, quaking with indignation, glaring at me through thick, smudged horn-rimmed glasses. He was small and wiry, wound tight, in his early eighties. Don’t take it personally, I responded with strained jocularity, a bit nonplussed by his ferocity. I may not be perfect, he continued grimly, but I do the best I can. I resent being called a sinner. What about you? How would you respond to being called a sinner?

Over twenty years later, in the middle of the 1990’s, I preached a sermon series on the Deadly Sins in three different locations. In each, the initial response was the same. It can best be described as amusement, almost as if people were saying to themselves, Sin? Isn’t that droll. For some unexplained reason, thinking about sin seemed to be a kind of fad. The Sunday Times of London republished a series of quite good essays on the Seven Deadly Sins. The New York Times Sunday Literary Section copied them about a year later with a series of decidedly inferior quality. The emotional tenor of both series was similar to the response to my sermons. Sin? How quaint. In vogue for a season, but like other trends, forgotten within a few weeks.

It is true that some contemporary artists, such as David Fincher in his film Se7en, have used sin as a convenient metaphor for contextualization. And the consequences of sinful behavior is the major theme in countless great movies from The Godfather to The Shawshank Redemption, Wall Street to The Hangover. But in spite of those occasional anomalies, we live in an era where the concept of sin has weakened its hold on our collective imagination. That was not always the case; for over fifteen centuries in the West, sin was at the very center of human consciousness and identity. The last three centuries, however, have witnessed a paradigm shift in human self-understanding. The notion of sin is now consciously rejected by many, and held in mild derision by many others. Only the most explicitly religious individuals would still consider sin to be a primary category used to describe the human condition, as the source of our unhappiness. There are two reasons for this.

The Demise of Sin as a Category for Human Identity

The first reason is a pervasive misunderstanding of the nature of sin itself. Most people consider sin to be behavior that violates a God-given moral code. This is true as far as it goes, but the full biblical vision understands sin not in terms of what people do. On the contrary, sin should be seen as a basic inner attitude of self-absorption that alienates human beings from God, from one another and even from self. True, it is sin that motivates people to act in harmful, destructive ways. But spiritually, the problem is not the action but the inner attitude.

This is certainly what Jesus taught:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matt

5

:

27

-

28

)

‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come. (Mark

7

:

18

-

21

)

From the biblical perspective, if the human dilemma is to be resolved, it is this inner attitude that must be overcome. It is sin that must be resolved if human beings are to become happy, content and know any kind of permanent wellbeing.

At the dawn of the 21st century such notions of sin have passed from public view. Yes, concerned voices have been raised that the loss of a sense of sin has greatly weakened not just our social fabric, but also our ability to find individual meaning and happiness. But outside of rightwing moral polemic, those voices have been raised in isolation. In his book What Ever Became of Sin?, the eminent psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote,

Wrong things are being done, we know; tares are being sown in wheat fields at night. But is no one responsible, no one answerable for these acts? Anxiety and depression we all acknowledge, and even vague guilt feelings; but has no one committed any sin?²

Menninger describes a society so dominated by moral relativism and lack of personal responsibility, there is no place for any notion of sin.

Philosophical, Scientific and Psychological Explanations for Human Discontent

The second reason for the demise of sin has been an intellectual impulse over three centuries to explain evil and human unhappiness in philosophical, scientific and psychological terms. This began with the Enlightenment’s exaltation of reason over revelation. Historically, within Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, ultimate truth might be reflected in nature and more fully understood through reason, but the deepest truth came only from revelation, God’s self-disclosure to individual human beings. Enlightenment thinkers rejected this biblical interpretation and affirmed that reason alone had the power to unlock all mysteries of creation. Rene Descartes set the paradigm by reducing certainty to the intelligent self: I think, therefore I am.³ Immanuel Kant clarified the implications of this by forcing all certainty into the scope of reason. In Critique of Pure Reason he wrote, All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.⁴ With religious faith thus pushed beyond the pale of certainty, the foundation of morality had to be placed in an arena free from revelation. Within this intellectual framework, all moral truth—whether focusing on sin or virtue, had to be justified by either reason or human experience.

With its own inner logic, the next step in this process was a movement away from objectivity towards subjectivity, resulting in a further undermining of traditional moral values. In the early 19th century, the nascent academic disciplines of comparative religion and comparative anthropology began to question the notion of one dominant objective moral truth. In the natural sciences, accepted certainties of natural law were also becoming relative, especially with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. If creation was the result of evolutionary random selection rather than providential design, was there any higher truth or good at all?

Scientific breakthroughs in the early 20th century—particularly in the realm of quantum mechanics—conclusively shattered long held certainties concerning the nature of physical reality and truth itself. If the basic stuff of the universe has no fixed reality—if sub-atomic electrons can be both wave and particle depending on one’s perspective—and may not even exist without human observation—then reality itself can no longer be objective. The implications for morality are obvious. All morality too becomes subjective. In this postmodern vision, the notion of sin is simply absurd.

If these developments in philosophy and science dealt a crippling blow to notions of revelation and objective truth, the knockout punch came from the realm of psychology. Although the 20th century saw the development of dozens of different psychotherapeutic theories, they all shared a basic paradigm: the centering of human lives on relationships between internal and external forces. For all of us, the tension and stress of everyday existence affects these psychological relationships: individuals must make choices in order to maintain an inner balance; these choices may be destructive or positive; under stress, emergency readjustments are made to maintain the integrity or balance of the human organism. Some of these adjustments are beneficial, leading to a healthy inner balance. But other choices—providing a psychological opening for fear, anger, despair, anxiety or runaway fantasy—may cause even further stress. If inner balance becomes the stated goal, our choices may be morally wrong and personally lifesaving at the same time. Most choices are made without the involvement of consciousness or reason. Usually people do well, automatically choosing something positive or at least a lesser evil.

Over the course of the twentieth century this goal of maintaining an inner psychological balance replaced fidelity to God as the source of wellbeing, and for many was seen as the ultimate meaning of human existence. With this paradigm morality was reduced to a self held in balance, with no room for concern for neighbor, society, or God. Although there is no question that this model has helped literally millions to live more contented and productive lives, it leaves no possibility for unease about sin or immorality. Some psychotherapists and individual patients may be troubled about sin for their particular inner balance, but others may find their balance in amoral or even immoral adjustments.

Other developments in psychology related to behaviorism, pharmacology, and learning theory continued to assert that wellbeing was unrelated to moral choice. Let’s assume this is true—that particular behavior was the result of many determining events and forces, often unconscious or outside any personal control. How could an individual then be held responsible? If our behavior isn’t voluntary, there can be no personal moral responsibility. With this attitude dominant in modern psychology, as Karl Menninger wrote a generation ago, many sins that privately led to guilt came to be seen as having nothing to do with morality, with right or wrong. If behavior is really wrong, it is a crime, unless of course it is an illness. Non-criminal acts may be unpleasant, inelegant, in bad taste. But are they sinful?

Where Has This Brought Us?

At the beginning of the 21st century all these threads were woven into a whole fabric. If the woof is an intellectual acceptance of psychological and sociological determinism—meaning that we lack morally significant freedom—the warp is a subjective relativism, where there is no objective truth and people can create their own morality with each choice they make. As antithetical and even contradictory as these perspectives appear, what they share in common is an absence of moral accountability. If inner balance is the goal, questions of morality are unnecessary. If there is no free will involved in one’s behavior, there can be no guilt, no responsibility, no sin. Taken another way, if a person has the ability to create one’s self and one’s environment, there is no accountability outside of self. Wrap that around a pervasive exaltation of self and cultural hedonism that resists moral imperative, the result is moral relativism and subjectivism. If no moral borders can be fixed—either culturally or personally—any notion of right or wrong and any idea of sin is irrelevant.

Where have these psychological, sociological and philosophical explanations of the human condition left us? As that fierce octogenarian from the Hollywood Congregational Church declared, I am not a sinner. I may not be perfect, but I do the best I can. I resent being called a sinner. Perhaps as a society we are more comfortable now that we no longer need to feel guilty about sin. After all, didn’t sin create a morbid, morose, artificial gloom? Good riddance. But who would claim that we’re better off? What exactly have more than two centuries of scientific research and psychological treatment accomplished? Although our society has made great progress in addressing injustices of racial and gender oppression, do you think that individually we are happier or more secure than our grandparents? Do you think our lives have more or less meaning?

Many of the neuroses that plague us may be indications of an unconscious but not forgotten history of trauma or serious misconduct, which has never been adequately named or resolved. Perhaps the cause of our personal unhappiness, and our society’s inequities, is sin. Wouldn’t that be amusing? Even though it can be truthfully said that the Church had nearly two millennia to solve our problems and failed miserably, perhaps that failure wasn’t due to theory, but to a failure to understand and act on the true nature of sin. As Paul Tillich wrote in The Shaking of the Foundations,

Have the men of our time lost a feeling for the meaning of sin? Do they realize that sin does not mean a moral act, that ‘sin’ should not be used in the plural . . . but rather our ‘sin’ is the great, all-pervading problem of our life. To be in the state of ‘sin’ is to be in the state of separation . . . from one’s fellow man, from one’s own true self and/or from his God.⁵

One does not have to be religious to affirm this. All it demands is a sober, honest evaluation of human nature. As the decidedly anti-religious Philip Roth wrote about Faunia Farley, the female protagonist in his novel The Human Stain,

. . . without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. That’s how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we have a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before the mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding.⁶

The True Nature of Sin

Stain or sin, it’s at the very heart of the human condition. How are we to understand it? We may need to go back to the beginning, and address questions not even asked in contemporary philosophy and psychology—questions about obedience, grace, salvation and redemption. The answers to these questions come not through observation and reflection, but from revelation. The beginning, that is, as the Bible describes it.

There are two creation stories in the Bible, and each answers a different question. The first question is Where do we come from? This is the question behind the creation stories in most cultures. The Hebrew Bible, addressing that question in Gen 1:1—2:3, gives a very simple answer: God created us. The Bible begins with four words, In the beginning God . . . In this first story, told in stately, dignified language, creation unfolds over seven days. At the end of each of the first five days, God saw that it was good. Then on the sixth day, at the very pinnacle of creation in chapter 1:26-27, God said,

Let us make man in our image . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.

Here is the first great revelation about human nature: we are created in the image of God. What is the meaning of this revelation? The clear implication is that a person does not bear the image of God in isolation, but only in relationship. Human beings were created to be in community. The image of God is found where a person with a unique self-consciousness is in relationship with others: Male and female he created him.

At the end of the sixth day, reflecting on humanity in God’s image, God "saw it was