I was re-reading the French reformed theologian, Jacques Ellul’s book, Anarchy and Christianity and came across this passage that I liked on sin.
“Sin in effect exists only in relation to God. The mistake of centuries of Christianity has been to regard sin as a moral fault. Biblically this is not the case. Sin is a break with God and all that this entails. When I say that people are not good, I am not adopting a Christian or a moral standpoint. I am saying that their two great characteristics, no matter what their society or education, are covetousness and the desire for power. We find these traits always and everywhere. If, then, we give people complete freedom to choose, they will inevitably seek to dominate someone or something and they will inevitably covet what belongs to others, and a strange feature of covetousness is that it can never be assuaged or satisfied, for once one thing is acquired it directs its attention to something else. Rene Girard has fully shown what the implications of covetousness are. No society is possible among people who compete for power or who covet and find themselves coveting the same thing. [20].”
There is so much that can be said about these words. If sin is reduced to morality than the opposite of sin is good morality but the bible says the opposite of sin is faith. It would also mean that we could save ourselves through our choices and actions. It would mean that God becomes a judge looking at our behaviors and that Jesus really died for nothing because we can save ourselves through our good choices and actions.
And of coarse this feeds the need to have power over and to covet. If sin goes beyond our relationship with God then it becomes something we have power over which is really about us controlling God because will have to respond to our choices. And it shows our covetousness because it shows us taking on the role of God to improve ourselves in ways God never asked for from us. Hence the eating of the fruit by Adam and Eve is a fall upward (Gerhard Forde), we tried to improve ourselves to get God to like us more, a form of coveting.
Rene Girard maps out the idea of scapegoating at a societal level, which shows power and covetousness in raw form. In simple what we do as people is gather together and collectively create a society and then design rules that hold it together and allow for social movement and social restraint. We then develop policing systems to identify and isolate people who break the rules. At the same time we need to tell ourselves that our society is superior to other societies and usually appeal to God for this. (See Peter Berger’s A Sacred Canopy). When someone comes along or a group who ignore key rules we implement systems to stop them, we then implement systems to find them guilt, and if the infraction of rules is great enough we implement systems to put them to death. When they die we see the justice in the whole of the system and it tells us that we are good as is our society. Scapegoating happens when we take innocent people, declare them guilty and put them to death all for the unconscious need to believe our system is just. What Girard discovered is that we create societies that end up being systems of power over and covetousness but are designed to make us think that we are not exerting power over or coveting.
Maybe this is why the Apostle Paul constantly uses the image of death and resurrection, of being born anew through the spirit. We cannot escape the struggle for power and covetousness without faith in God and the grace of God that continually puts us to death and raises us up anew?
