What is it that Christians attempt to deal with most commonly? What is it that Christians pronounce that Jesus came as a result of? What is the thing we attempt to remove from the world? I’ll give you a hint. it is one word.

 

Give up?

It is “Sin.”

 

If you’re like me and you don’t buy into the notion of original sin or that which the ten commandments is condemning as they are commonly talked about in more “fundamental” churches then you are left with a problem.  

 

What is sin?

 

No easy answer to this one folks... we can look around us and easily pick out what sin is... murder, rape, the destruction of habitat, driving our cars, the waste of industrialized nations, and general oppression/genocide.  It baffles me that we can easily as a group of faithful people decide what is sin in a great many instances and yet we don’t know what it is when we attempt to define it.  

 

I think this is the case (at least in the mainline churches and even beyond that particular context) that we are fearful of who and what might be labeled sinful by our definitions.  So we play a game of relativity when it comes to sin, often in our minds saying i have sinned but not knowing why what we have done is a sin, or saying that what i may call a sin is not what someone else would call a sin.  A sort of hyper contextualizing/relativizing of sin for fear of universalizing sin.  Both of these have their problems but neither really answers my question of what sin is.

 

As per the norm I’ve been wrestling with various theological/moral/ethical topics as of late and sin is the one i have been grappling with most... the results of my wresting have not been as fruitful as I had hoped, however what i have come up with is at least thought provoking and not without merit/truth.  Below is a definition of sin that I’ve been working on.  It has holes as all definitions do but i think this might be helpful for people to begin looking at to better understand what i think sin is...

 

 

with any luck my next post will explain why i think this is what sin can be defined as.  please comment on this because it will help us all in the long run. as many have said the truth is in the dialogic....(conversation, dialogue, etc.)