{"id":21539,"date":"2012-07-18T13:52:20","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T18:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=21539"},"modified":"2012-07-18T13:54:07","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T18:54:07","slug":"exploring-mormon-thought-sin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2012\/07\/exploring-mormon-thought-sin\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Mormon Thought: Sin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> I’ve struggled with what to write in response to chapter 5 of The Problems of Theism and the Love of God<\/i>. Why? Because, except when it comes to nit-picky details, I’m in full agreement with Ostler for once. Indeed, I applaud this chapter and am eager to see how he moves forward with it in the next chapters.<\/p>\n

What to write, then? For fun, I think I’ll just insert here, as a kind of confirmation of what Ostler has to say, my own recent written reflections on Romans 1—a passage he cites on page 162. Here is the passage in its entirety, with my own translation:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s immediately within preaching, within the transfer of faith, that divine righteousness is revealed—as it\u2019s written: \u201cThe one who\u2019s righteous will live by faith\u201d—while divine wrath is revealed from heaven against all lack of divinity, against all human unrighteousness, against all those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. What\u2019s known of God is manifest among them, because God has made it manifest to them: his eternal power and divine nature—things indiscernible since the creation of the world—have been understood and discerned through the things he\u2019s made. So they\u2019re without excuse. Though they knew God, they didn\u2019t glorify him as God or give thanks to him; rather, they grew vain in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. In a word, professing wisdom, they became fools. And they have economized God\u2019s glory by making of it so many static images—things resembling mortal human beings or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God handed them over to the impurity they fantasize about, leaving them to dishonor their bodies among themselves—those who in the lusts of their heart replaced God\u2019s truth with the lie and worshiped and served the created in the place of the creator . . . . (Romans 1:17-25.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously, there is a much to be said about this passage. <\/p>\n

To begin, it should be noted that it opens by contrasting two distinct revelations. On the one hand, divine righteousness is immanently revealed in the work of preaching; on the other, divine wrath is transcendently revealed from heaven against human unrighteousness. With Adam Miller [Adam Miller, Badiou, Marion and St Paul: Immanent Grace<\/i> (New York: Continuum, 2008), 24], I think it best \u201cto assert that these two revelations are, in fact, one. . . . The difference between them is a question of appearance. Whether the revelation is seen as \u2018good news\u2019 or as \u2018wrath\u2019 depends on the disposition of the person to whom it appears.\u201d There is, in other words, only one revelation, but it is experienced in two drastically distinct ways—as immanent or as transcendent, as God\u2019s righteousness or as God\u2019s anger—depending on one\u2019s relationship to truth. Where truth is preached, where the \u201ctransfer of faith\u201d takes place, the revelation is one of God\u2019s righteousness. Where truth is suppressed in unrighteousness, the revelation is—or at least will eventually be—one of God\u2019s anger.<\/p>\n

What is the \u201ctruth\u201d that human beings suppress in unrighteousness? In a word, that truth is \u201cwhat\u2019s known of God,\u201d what \u201cGod has made . . . manifest,\u201d namely, \u201chis eternal power and divine nature.\u201d It is God\u2019s very nature that human beings suppress in unrighteousness, obscuring his grace and his nearness by regarding him only as a distant and wrathful deity—as a violent sovereign who, from afar, wills only to punish and to make miserable. [See James E. Faulconer, Romans 1: Notes and Reflections<\/i> (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1999), 73-75.] Why does this truth need to be suppressed? Because, as Paul explains, the truth is something clearly \u201cunderstood and discerned through the things [God has] made.\u201d The createdness of the world is itself \u201cindiscernible,\u201d but it can nonetheless be readily discerned if one attends with care to what makes up the world. Indeed, the truth is so readily available, according to Paul, that human beings are \u201cwithout excuse.\u201d Every failure to \u201cglorify . . . God or give thanks to him\u201d is rooted in willful refusal because \u201cthey kn[o]w God.\u201d The consequence is that the wicked \u201cgr[o]w vain in their thinking, and their senseless hearts [are] darkened.\u201d Those who pretend to be wise turn out to be fools\u2014fools because they refuse to see what is right under their noses.<\/p>\n

The truth, then, is immanent to the world, though the very structure of the world as human beings experience it veils the truth, rendering it indiscernible except as a kind of vague threat of an eventual cataclysm to come at the end of time. Thanks to human unrighteousness—and remember that Paul will go on to claim that \u201cthere\u2019s no one who\u2019s righteous, not even one\u201d (Romans 3:10)—the truth is displaced into a beyond, being transformed in the process. [Note that Paul thus criticizes in unbelievers precisely what Nietzsche criticizes in believers: the displacement of goodness into the beyond. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism<\/i>, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 60-62.] Divine righteousness manifested in the nearness of the kingdom of God becomes divine wrath eventually to be made manifest from the meanwhile silent heavens. Human beings in all their unrighteousness structure their world in a way that will leave no room for God, at least until he finally decides to plunge the world into apocalyptic disaster. People need God to dwell in transcendence so that he does not get in the way of their desires, \u201cthe lusts of their heart.\u201d As C. S. Lewis nicely puts it, \u201cWe want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, \u2018liked to see young people enjoying themselves,\u2019 and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, \u2018a good time was had by all.\u2019\u201d [C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain<\/i> (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 31.] The truth of God\u2019s love and grace is too much to bear because it might impose limits on one\u2019s pursuit of pleasure, because it might speak ill of one\u2019s impure fantasies.<\/p>\n

Ironically, though, the world that human beings assemble in order to keep God out as long as possible can be constructed only of materials God has given to them. Hence, the fully secularized human world is a pastiche of created things, a weave of gifts that severally witness God\u2019s love and grace but that collectively pretend that he is elsewhere and uninterested. Paul puts it this way: \u201cthey have economized God\u2019s glory.\u201d In The Great Divorce<\/i>, C. S. Lewis portrays an \u201cIntelligent Man\u201d who journeys to heaven only with the hope of bringing back something solid enough to make a fortune: \u201cI\u2019m not going on this trip for my health. As far as that goes I don\u2019t think it would suit me up there. But if I can come back with some real commodities—anything at all that you could really bite or drink or sit on—why, at once you\u2019d get a demand down in our town. I\u2019d start a little business. I\u2019d have something to sell.\u201d [C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce<\/i> (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 13, emphasis in original.] This is the very structure of the world, of the world as economy. Everything on the market is a gift from God, but it has been transformed into a commodity so that profits accrued can be employed to pursue one\u2019s private desires. In the place of God\u2019s infinite and immanent glory—which has been displaced into the beyond—one finds only \u201cso many static images,\u201d so many idols.<\/p>\n

The idol trade human beings thus establish, desperately hoping that the supposedly wrathful heavens remain silent for another generation to allow them to continue in their beloved fantasies, amounts to what Paul calls \u201cthe lie,\u201d the lie that replaces \u201cGod\u2019s truth\u201d as human beings worship \u201cthe created in the place of the creator.\u201d But the lie does not persist and the wrath of God, it turns out, does not wait. God has, according to Paul, already \u201chanded [the unrighteous] over to the impurity they fantasize about, leaving them to dishonor their bodies among themselves.\u201d The event in which \u201cdivine wrath is revealed from heaven . . . against all human unrighteousness\u201d thus happens when the prohibitions that give strength to perverse desires are lifted in response to popular demand. And the ironic result is, after a brief period of ecstatic enjoyment, disillusionment and depression. Human beings need prohibitions to enjoy their transgression. The \u201cNo!\u201d of the taboo engenders the fantasies that make transgression genuinely enjoyable. [See Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality<\/i>, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986).] Paul himself explains this point later in the letter to the Romans: \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have known what it is to lust if the law hadn\u2019t said, \u2018Thou shalt not lust!\u2019\u201d (Romans 7:7). As one reader of Paul puts it, \u201cthe law is what gives life to desire.\u201d [Badiou, Saint Paul<\/i>, 79.]<\/p>\n

Desire stripped of its force at the moment of its fulfillment, fantasies realized but only as utter boredom, transgression deprived of its transgressiveness as the banal order of the day—such is the wrathful revelation the unrighteous see in the messianic deactivation of the Law. Such, in other words, is what the saints in Corinth largely saw in the announcement of the gospel. Recognizing that \u201call things are lawful,\u201d they were overwhelmed by the possibility of pursuing every perverse fantasy they had ever entertained. But the consequent explosion of perverse activity and frenetic selfishness gave way—or would soon have given way, had Paul not intervened—to ennui, which turns out to be the most tortuous form of God\u2019s wrath. [As Adam Miller says: \u201cFantasy, fear, and boredom: the hallmarks of sin. Boredom: the hallmark of sin?\u201d Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology<\/i> (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012), 12.]<\/p>\n

So goes the basic anthropology Paul lays out in his letter to the Romans. Obviously, I have offered here only a thumbnail sketch, focusing only on the first chapter of Paul\u2019s eight-chapters-long discussion. But I believe I have said enough to make the picture relatively clear. There is a perfect reciprocity between human unrighteousness (humans being little more than bundles of transgressive fantasies and impure desires) and the economic order of the world (that order being little more than a market for trading idols). Every idol on offer is a polished mirror in which a transgressive human fantasy adores itself, enjoying the image<\/i> of transgression much more than the act<\/i>. The idol, in the words of Jean-Luc Marion, \u201cfreezes in a figure that which vision aims at in a glance\u201d and only thus \u201cclose[s] the horizon\u201d to keep God\u2019s supposedly wrathful transcendence out of the picture. [Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being<\/i>, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 26.] Stabilizing the economy of the idol trade, and therefore automatizing the life of transgressive desire, is a set of prohibitions: the Law. But the Law has been rendered inoperative by the messianic event of Jesus Christ\u2019s death and resurrection, and the result is that human beings, trapped in unrighteousness, flounder in ever more deeply affecting boredom. They do so, that is, unless they become righteous, unless they \u201care made righteous\u201d (\u201cjustified,\u201d as the word is usually translated) by faith<\/i>, delivered (\u201csaved,\u201d as the word is usually translated) by love<\/i>, and—this is the crucial point—anchored by hope<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve struggled with what to write in response to chapter 5 of The Problems of Theism and the Love of God. Why? Because, except when it comes to nit-picky details, I’m in full agreement with Ostler for once. Indeed, I applaud this chapter and am eager to see how he moves forward with it in the next chapters. What to write, then? For fun, I think I’ll just insert here, as a kind of confirmation of what Ostler has to say, my own recent written reflections on Romans 1—a passage he cites on page 162. Here is the passage in its entirety, with my own translation: It\u2019s immediately within preaching, within the transfer of faith, that divine righteousness is revealed—as it\u2019s written: \u201cThe one who\u2019s righteous will live by faith\u201d—while divine wrath is revealed from heaven against all lack of divinity, against all human unrighteousness, against all those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. What\u2019s known of God is manifest among them, because God has made it manifest to them: his eternal power and divine nature—things indiscernible since the creation of the world—have been understood and discerned through the things he\u2019s made. So they\u2019re without excuse. Though they knew God, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21539"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21541,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21539\/revisions\/21541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}