Sin and Power
By not getting the connection between sin and power right we set ourselves up to misunderstand just about everything about being Christians. The desire for power, the desire to “be like God,” lies at the root of the existence and nature of sin. As humans first contemplated the decision to violate their relationship with God, the serpent presented the issues involved as a power struggle: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5). And “the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (vs. 6). Wisdom is needed for independence, for the ability to make one's own decisions, which, in right relationship with God, Adam and Eve had no need for. To live apart from God's will, apart from close relationship with God, requires that one have one's own “knowledge of good and evil.” To gain that independence, one must eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:17). That is the route to independence.
René Girard gives us much help in understanding desire and power. A basic part of being human is the desire to be like others. This desire is not evil, but it leads to many evils. It does so because one aspect of desire to be like an admirable model is competition: if you are more like my model than I am, then I must one-up you in some way, or eliminate you. And the model is, of course, more like the model than I can ever be and so can be the archrival. Desire to be like a model can be desire to replace the model. The sum of many such relationships is social chaos.
For instance, I can only be the best teacher of Bible doctrine if I out-do those whom I think are better at it than I am or those whom others whose opinion matters to me think are better at it than I am. If such an archrival also has a beautiful wife, whom I lust after, and plays guitar better than I do, all the better. Envy can destroy me, but not, it seems quite clear to me, if I can supplant him. But I may miss the fact that he envies me. If we live in a place without laws, we will fight.
Chaos is not the end of the story, and here we come to the heart of Girard's thought. We humans do achieve order. We do get ourselves organized. The “social contract” is real, and its root is the desire to reduce the chaos. Because there are laws, guitarists do not often kill each other. (I have read about a certain country in which, during a period of relative lawlessness, they did kill each other.)
But laws discriminate and do not involve us in admitting the real causes of chaos. The guitarist who is thrown in jail is not one who has envied his rival but one who has killed his rival. It is not even necessary to find the real murderer as long as we act out the ritual of accusation, conviction, and ostracism or execution. As long as we blame, we restore order. It is inconvenient to accept that we are all to blame, so we achieve order by focusing the blame on some individual or some relatively small group. The basis of social order is the common enemy. To admit the real causes of the chaos would be to say that there is something fundamentally wrong with all of us.
A classic example—or better, analogy—is Nazism. Germans were defeated and humiliated. Nazis blamed the Jews for this, which was, viewed rationally, laughable. But the desire not to blame oneself (or one's people) is so strong that the irrational was believed. And still is, if we find analogies closer to home in, for instance, American anti-welfarism (blaming the poor), racism (blaming the blacks), anti-immigrationism, anti-Bushism (since this is not just a game for Republicans), or anti-what-have-you-ism. The desire not to blame oneself or one's people, not to admit the real causes of chaos, is so strong that we find someone else, some small minority of the human number, to blame.
Satan is “the accuser.” That is what his name means. As such, he personifies both what we avoid—self-accusation—and how we avoid it—accusation of another. Accusation is the basis of social order, so Satan is “the prince of this world.”
Most of us, most of the time, want to be on the side of the accusers, not among the accused. Our models, our heroes, are those who are shown to be right, who are righteous, or at least successful at the end of the story.
Jesus was different. He was accused and was not vindicated, at least not to society. He took up the cross. He turned the tables on what humans normally desire. He brought no accusation. Adopting him as one's model—and getting the story about him right—is sanctification.
For Adam and Eve, the model/rival was God. The desire to supplant or eliminate God is the definition of sin. Because we do not know that, we can get hung up on behavioral details when we are thinking about sin and sanctification. I do not say that theologians make this mistake, only that non-theologian American evangelicals (and probably many of the theologians as well) do so in our spirituality. Again, I am not talking about spirituality as we think it ought to be or as we write about it in good books, but about what we actually practice and encourage each other in practicing. We might agree that the issue is relationship with God, but we generally believe our faulty conscience when it says that what we need to do is to be better people.
Understanding sin as expressing a power struggle helps us to understand sanctification. Sanctification is a renunciation of power struggles, the struggle against God and all the other fights as well.
Church is where the power struggles do not take place. “It shall not be so among you.”
At heart, the sin of Adam and Eve was their lack of trust in God. Augustine sees the anxiety of an infant as the paradigm for concupiscence. Even as the loving parent is bringing food, the infant screams and flails about in fear that he has been abandoned to his own resources. He believes that he must take care of himself. The human person is not complete in itself at any age, so concupiscence continues. The human is always trying to organize his own sustenance and growth. A human's striving for power is an expression not of strength but of anxiety. “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you [God]” because it is only in quitting the struggle for self-sustenance and trusting God, who provides all we need, that we find rest from our anxiety. That Adam and Eve did not do so and that we do not do so is the cause of all human distress, competition, greed, fear, violence, and all that.
Therefore, conversion is departure from fear: “Throw yourself upon him. Do not fear. He will not pull away and let you fall. Throw yourself without fear, and he will receive you and heal you.”
Augustine also calls concupiscence “that affection of the mind that aims at the enjoyment of oneself and one's neighbor without reference to God.” We prefer what destroys us, which is lack of relationship with God. Beginning with Eve, we believe the lie that God is not committed to our welfare and sustenance. The opposite of concupiscence is love for God, living with “reference to God.” Our love for God is weak or twisted because we do not have (nor do we want) a right understanding of God.
One of the fundamental failings of Christians in the message they have brought to the world has been their portrayal of God as stingy. If there is something good that we need, God is providing it. We have only to receive it. I see no exception to this statement in Scripture. But instead of believing this, we worry over what God is requiring of us, we wonder if he really wants to receive any person who comes in faith, we teach fear of non-Christian ideologies, we feel we must go to war to protect—to protect what?—, we require of people something that has sometimes been called the “Protestant work-ethic,” we give people spiritual disciplines that imply that we must be uneasy around God or that the problem lies in our lack of effort or in our lack of self-integration, or in our possession of a body. We misinterpret the parable of the widow and the judge. On and on. So repeat it: If there is something good that we need, God is providing it. We have only to receive it.
I do not mean this to say that spiritual disciplines—perhaps better “life disciplines”—are valueless. Quite the opposite. But we undertake them to open ourselves to God, not to convince God of anything. We do them because God is full of grace toward us, not as if we have to get something by all our work. Benedictine monks, for instance, turn from the three central expressions of power, that anxiety for self, in human life: sex, individual choice, and possession. So celibacy, unquestioning obedience, and poverty are ways of teaching oneself about renunciation of power, about taking up one's cross, about giving up the anxiety that seeking power is. If I do not seek sex, rights, or possessions, I can be more open to receive sustenance from God.