“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”
The story of the Temptations of Christ is read on the First Sunday in Lent. In response to the second temptation, Christ responds with these words: “thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” But, of course, in relation to the idea and the reality of the doctrine of original sin, that is exactly and constantly what we do. We tempt God. We constantly put God to the test, trying to make him accountable and measurable to us. Our task this Lent is to ponder the mystery of our sinfulness, the mystery of original sin.
Original Sin: What is it and why does it matter?
Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with the world? Have you ever wondered, what’s wrong with me? In other words, have you ever had that sense that nothing is the way it should be either with ourselves or others or our world and day? Has that sense of things not being right ever resulted in asking about evil? Unde hoc malum? Where does evil come from? Or do we persist in saying and thinking that everything is good; just a few bad apples in the pile that spoil everything?
Original sin is the doctrine that there is something radically and inescapably not right about any of us right from the get-go of our being. Very tough stuff. And yet, it seems, this is actually part and parcel of the good news. Original Sin catapults us into the totality of God’s grace and grants utter primacy to God’s will. Our task is to try to understand something about this strange and curious teaching that seems to cause so much consternation. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton observes, it is the most empirical of all Christian teachings, the most provable from experience.
A doctrine. A teaching. Is it in the Creed? Not directly. But it is there implicitly in terms of the possibilities of the forgiveness of sins. “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” Sin is part and parcel of the Christian proclamation of faith. Is it part of an Anglican understanding? Not just the Anglican understanding but as part and parcel of the general orthodoxy of Western Christianity in both its Roman and Protestant forms. So yes. It is explicitly mentioned in the Thirty-nine Articles, in Article IX, where it has the curious distinction of being the only Greek phrase actually given in Greek in the BCP; Φρονημα σαρκος.
Is it biblical? Yes and no. Meaning that it while rooted in the Old Testament and expressed in the New Testament, it is an idea that belongs to the development of doctrine about sin and grace. Scripture, however, is the illuminating force and principle for the understanding of the doctrine.
Look at some passages of Scripture. Psalm 51 is one of the great penitential psalms, a psalm often attributed to David in repentance for his great sin, his adultery with Bathsheba and his conspiring in the murder of Uriah. In that psalm we read, “in sin hath my mother conceived me.” What does that mean? Some have thought that original sin is about an infection in our humanity that is literally passed on through sexual intercourse. Is that what David is saying in this psalm? Is he blaming his mother for his actions? Or is he identifying something that isn’t right in the root of his own being?
“The good that I would I do not,” St. Paul say, “the evil that I would not do, that do I do.” Wow. There’s a problem. Is it just Paul’ problem? No. He identifies the human contradiction, I think, the deep seated problem of our wills.
Original sin is not a problem with our bodies but our wills.
To think it will mean negotiating between two principles: on the one hand, the essential goodness of our created being; on the other hand, the intrinsic evil of our wills. In the Collect for Ash Wednesday and Lent, Almighty God is acknowledged as the God “who hatest nothing that thou hast made” and yet, at the same time “dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent.” Even with the creation and making of “new and contrite hearts’, we still are to “worthily lament[ ] our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness.” It is in that twofold view of things that we can, perhaps, begin to make sense of the doctrine of original sin and see how it catapults us into the grace of God.
But first, let us consider a few places where the doctrine is indicated in the BCP with a greater or lesser degree of explicitness, for instance, the Service of Baptism. The exhortation is wonderfully direct. “God willeth all men to be saved from the fault and corruption of the nature which they inherit” and not just “the actual sins which they [and we] commit” (BCP, p. 523). Holy Baptism confers a gift “which by nature [we] cannot have.” It is sola gratia, we might say.
Certain Collects of the Prayer Book, almost chosen at random also convey the primary understanding that we are sinners totally in need of God’s redemptive grace. “We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”(Lent 2); “the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall” (Trinity 15); “forasmuch we without thee we are not able to please thee” (Trinity 19); “because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee” (Trinity 1); “O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men” (Easter 4); “O God who knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright” (Epiphany 4); and so on and so on.
And then, on the positive side that arises from this perspective of our general sinfulness, we pray God to “grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same” (Epiphany 1). Something of the grace of God is understood to be at work in us and through our wills; “the grace,” for instance “to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness and true holiness, to thy honour and glory” (Lent 1).
This understanding contributes to the feature of the confession of sins as a regular part of our liturgy. The confession of sin belongs to the confession of praise, to the very joy of redemption itself. It allows us to look into ourselves honestly and clearly and not be overcome or destroyed by what we find within ourselves for “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart” (John 3.20). The doctrine of original sin allows us to face not simply our weaknesses but, more profoundly, our wickednesses; not just our actions and non-actions, not just our thoughts and desires, but the very tendency to deny God, and ourselves as his creatures.
As Article IX puts it, “man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil” (BCP, p. 702). G.K. Chesterton notes the wonderful irony of it all. “There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.” To confess our sins means to acknowledge the truth of ourselves in the truth of God and to know that we are not as we should and seek to be. The confession is to God, desiring from him that there be more than this opposition and division of ourselves from him and from one another. Confession seeks God’s grace out of the vision of his glory. The confession of sin is the confession of God’s praise.
God is greater than our sinfulness and, somehow, through our sinfulness we may come to know that.
“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”
Fr. David Curry
March 15th, 2011