A friend recently asked me whether I believed in sin. It was a strange question for me to consider because the concept of “belief” as applied to “sin” already suggests that sin itself is not a self-evident or manifest reality. Considering the question, I had to answer that I didn’t actually believe in sin as an objective ontic something. Hurt, wounds, violence, injustice, suffering – these are objective realities that I have no trouble identifying. It was in naming the contrast or painful human experiences as sin with which I had the difficulty, since sin connotes moral, spiritual, intellectual, or volitional defect or evil. My intuition pushes back against this reading of the suffering the world reflects, at least in the microcosm, the imperfection of creatures, or perhaps better put, animals, and in a best case scenario, animals in process.
As I considered this question, I discerned that what is typically identified as sin is a byproduct of the natural limit of animal or creaturely life. This is to say, we are developmental, process-dependent, works of complex animal life. We are imperfect in the truest sense – that is, we are not completed beings but ongoing verbs with past tense helping verbs and “ing” endings. I have been trying; you have been growing; they have been seeking. In Christian language the term we use is “eschatological,” which connotes that the process has an end or a purpose. But, I am inclined to think this is just a more confident way of acknowledging the inevitable nature of worldly imperfection. Continue reading “A Lenten Reflection by Natalie Weaver”
Feminism and Religion 