Area Sex Expert Corrects Augustine's Doctrine of Sin
How a bad view of sin is wrecking everything.
“You know what I can’t wait for,” said my child just now, “the new Rey movie.”
“Really?” I said, “Are you sure?” She then rolled her eyes. You always think you know the depth and height and measure of your children’s sarcastic inclinations, but you don’t, not really.
In a similar kind of way, I always think I’m going to find something to blog about besides Sheila Wray Gregoire, but then I go and break my resolution the next moment.
First of all, let the record show that I am not a bad person. Someone on Twitter—the first person I ever blocked, incidentally—recently called me a “bad actor.” I expect he meant that my long piece about Wray Gregoire failed to do her justice and that I was acting in bad faith. That is not true. I am as good a person as they come, which, given how God says there are none good, not even one, isn’t saying much, but still. By saying that I am not bad, I mean that I am not being unfair to Wray Gregoire. She is holding herself out as an expert on sex and marriage and yet does not deliver on her promises. Her expertise is anti-biblical and betrays a shallow appreciation of the mystery of men and women, not to mention theology.
Case in point, this terrible terrible article that a lovely friend sent to me. It’s titled “It’s Not All Sin: The Problem With Over-Spiritualizing Our Problems,” and because it’s so bad, I’m going to Fisk it now, for my own enjoyment, because I’m a good person and not a bad one.
First of all, we come to a large subtitle declaring that “Sin Isn’t the Cause of All the Bad or Counterproductive Things We Do” after which she declares that “blaming it on sin does harm.” “When you have the wrong diagnosis,” she forfends, “you’re going to have the wrong solution. And that can actually compound the problem.” Boy, I literally could not agree more. Diagnosing something incorrectly does mean you will never find the correct solution, and so that is why you should immediately notice that she is wrong right off the bat. Sin is the cause of all the bad or counterproductive things we do. Sin is the thing that causes the harm.
I’m so sorry, but because this is apparently really hard, let me just go back to the beginning, just real quick. So, you might remember, God made Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden and gave them one command—don’t eat any fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—but then they did eat the fruit, and so sin entered the world which is the cause of all the bad and counterproductive things we do. That moment is called “The Fall” because Adam and Eve fell into sin, dragging the entire human family along with them and putting all of creation under a groaning burden, waiting for its redemption.
I don’t know if she is bad or ignorant, but it’s important to understand what sin is. To quote the Presbyterians, sin is “any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.” It is not doing what you are supposed do, and doing what you are not supposed to. It is what makes you a “miserable offender.”
Sin is a broad category and a narrow one. It concerns you, and every other person you may ever encounter. It is both straightforward and confusing, narrow and vast, inconsequential and compassing the whole world. You can sin against another person, God, and yourself without knowing it or intending to, and you can also sin against all those people on purpose. At the same time, because everyone else is also sinning, you will suffer the effects of other people’s sin. Sin is like a pebble skipping across the top of the water, and then bashing into a fragile baby bird on the far bank. Its consequences are everywhere and inescapable. This is so basic, everyone knew it before yesterday throughout the Christian West. Now that the West is no longer Christian, some Christians apparently do not know it, which leads them to write sentences like this:
One of the issues with Christianity over the ages is that we’ve never had a thorough understanding of the problems of the human condition.
Oh. My. Heavenly. Saints. Above. Read. A. Book. For. Crying. Out. Loud.
You could read so many books—indeed, even the book she is about to mention. But you needn’t go that far. Just read the Bible, just for a second. The Bible, shall I say it again more slowly, the BIBLE is one text that has such a thorough and complete understanding of the problems of the human condition that every other text is merely derivative, they can only spin out the implications and depth of what the Scriptures say. Or, as my child just said, “Christians have never written on the subject of pain before,” which was at least obvious enough that I was able to roll my eyes before she rolled hers.
Wray Gregoire goes on:
We tend to blame everything on “sin” and lack of faith or lack of trust in God. Yesterday my husband and I got into a conversation with someone after church about Augustine’s Confessions, and we got talking about the famous “pear” episode, from which “worm theology”, the thought that we are all helpless sinners and can do nothing else, really derived and got its start. Augustine wrote his Confessions around 400 A.D. He was a prominent Christian scholar in what is now Algeria, and had converted to Christianity after quite a promiscuous lifestyle. He never married, but became one of the fathers of the faith, his writings very influential.
First of all, there is no “we” in this case. For a supposed Christian expert on human relationships and marriage in particular not to know and understand the depth and breadth of sin is appalling, though, I suppose, not unexpected. Nothing I’ve read of her writing has dealt in a real and serious way with any Biblical text. But now she is going to make a hash of Saint Augustine as well, whom, one can see as the blog post goes on, she has never read.
One of the Four Doctors of the Western Church, Saint Augustine (AD 354–430), Bishop of Hippo - National Trust British (English) School between 1575 and 1599 or, as I like to call it, St. Augustine after reading a Bare Marriage Post about himself.
Second of all, it’s fine to blame sin for bad things in the world because that’s what causes them, along with the Devil, whose problems can also be lumped under the category of sin, as least as one might regard its purely vainglorious and treacherous aspects. And third, lack of faith and lack of trust in God are also core sins, and as such, they are the problem. If you really trusted God, you wouldn’t sin. But you can’t trust him, because you’re a sinner. It’s like a terrible merry-go-round. Gosh, I wonder if anyone has ever written about any of this before?
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