If You Can't Sin, then You Can't Change


The confession (or disclosure) of sins, even from a simply human point of view, frees us and facilitates our reconciliation with others. Through such an admission man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of, takes responsibility for them, and thereby opens himself again to God and to the communion of the Church in order to make a new future possible. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1455).

During the Reformation, one of the big arguments between Catholics and Protestants was over the nature of the church and its relationship to the concrete institution of believers gathered together--i.e. the "ekklesia" or church.  To grossly simplify the arguments, Protestants in the main argued that the church per se could not be directly identified with the concrete body of believers or any particular institution, while Roman Catholics insisted that the institution of the Roman Catholic Church was the church per se.  This debate is predicated on the idea that the church per se was a divine institution, and thus necessarily perfect.  Protestants asserted that one cannot identify the church per se with any concrete institution because all human institutions are flawed, while the Catholic position was that the institution of the Roman Catholic Church was specially and uniquely protected from the flaws of human institutions because of its divine status.  Again, these are gross simplifications of complex theological positions, but the point that all sides agree on is that "the church," however that is defined, is perfect and free from sin.

Rachel Held Evans has been in the last month or so talking about the idea of "evangelical exceptionalism."  The idea here is that the fundamental presupposition of the evangelical world is that the evangelical church is special, set apart, and thus a priori correct and right and good.  To the extent that's right (and it certainly seems to be, based on my experience of the evangelical world and evangelical culture), it represents a functional embrace of the traditional Roman Catholic position on the nature of the church, or at least makes the difference between the two positions essentially nominal and definitional.  "The evangelical church," while it may be defined in a looser way that the Roman Catholic Church is defined, is just as much of an institution that is set apart from the normal human tendency toward mistakes and sinfulness.

Another sign of the basic similarities between Roman Catholics and evangelicals can be seen in the default manner of dealing with counter-evidence of the sinless nature of the church.  Consider Pope John Paul II's 2000 "Day of Pardon."  As part of the 2000 Jubilee celebration, Pope John Paul II held a service on the 1st Sunday of Lent in which he called upon everyone to "Let us forgive and ask forgiveness!"  But it is important to read carefully the way Pope John Paul framed what was happening:

While we praise God who, in his merciful love, has produced in the Church a wonderful harvest of holiness, missionary zeal, total dedication to Christ and neighbour, we cannot fail to recognize the infidelities to the Gospel committed by some of our brethren, especially during the second millennium. Let us ask pardon for the divisions which have occurred among Christians, for the violence some have used in the service of the truth and for the distrustful and hostile attitudes sometimes taken towards the followers of other religions. (emphasis in original).

In other words, Pope John Paul was not asking for forgiveness for the church as church, but for the members of the church who did bad things.  He is very careful to separate out and wall off the church as such from any responsibility for the things done (in its name, it should be said) by its members.  The various tragic events in the history of the church are thus always and everywhere examples of user error, and never the result of design defects.

Compare that with Tim Keller's apologia for the evangelical movement in the United States.  Distilled to its essence, Keller's claim is all of the negative backlash toward evangelicals in the United States should be attributed to "big E-evangelism" which "serves as the civil or folk religion accepted by default as part of one’s social and political identity."  This is conceptually distinct from "small e-evangelism," which is real evangelicalism as such and has none of the characteristics (so says Keller) that people don't like about evangelicalism.  Said another way, like Pope John Paul said of the Roman Catholic Church, all the of the problems with evangelicalism is user error, none of which challenge or call into question the ontologically pristine core of the church.

What is interesting to me about this line of thought is that neither Pope John Paul nor Tim Keller would let any of the people committed to their pastoral care get away with a similar sort of two-step.  Both the Pope and Keller would say, correctly, that a core element of the Christian life is repentance, and that genuine repentance requires a full and complete acknowledgement on one's sin.  The paragraph from the Catechism, quoted above, makes clear that a penitent must "look squarely at the sins [he] is guilty of, [and] takes responsibility for them,"  If a penitent came to either the Pope or Keller and said "well, bad things happened because other people didn't properly listen and follow the totally correct things that I have said," neither of these folks would take that is a proper and full act of contrition and repentance. 

And if we were to ask either of these two men why this line of thought was not acceptable, they would likely tell us that the consciousness of having done something wrong is a necessary pre-condition to making the necessary changes that prevent the sinful behavior from happening in the future.  If the problem is the result of user error, then by definition you neither caused the problem nor have any real ability to prevent it from happening in the future.  After all, you didn't do anything wrong.  By failing to take personal responsibility, the penitent-but-not-really is not creating a way forward, a vehicle for change--or as the Catechism says "to make a new future possible."

If you set forth a rule that you can't sin, then you can't ever change, because it is through acknowledging your sin that you create the space that allows change.  And, yet, this is precisely what the church says about itself, and it seems to me that this is a big component of why we have the problems we have in the church.  When all of the problems and horrors associated with the church are externalized and "othered," there is never going to be any push toward change.  If the Inquisition, the Galileo Affair, the election of Trump, and all of the rest are the result of the unfortunate reality of "bad actors," then there is no reason to believe that we are not going to have all of the same bad actors and bad outcomes in the future.  Not only will nothing change, but in a way nothing can change.  Keller and Pope John Paul are, implicitly, throwing up their hands and telling us to expect more of the same going forward. 

What Evans, and others who are shining a light on these problems, want is not to tear down the church, but to find a way for it to be better, to do better by the people under its care and the people around it than it has done in the past.  To be better and do better requires it to understand that it has hamartanien, "missed the mark."  And to understand that it has missed the mark, it must first accept that it is even possible for it to have done so.

Does that require us to say that the church is fundamentally a human institution?  Maybe.  But the Christian faith insists that human beings are capable of amazing things--"Glory to God, whose power working in us does can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine," as the Book of Common Prayer says (paraphrasing Ephesians 3:20).  Recognizing that the church can sin doesn't deny the presence of God in its midst, or even its unique qualities.  It simply means that the church needs the transformation that comes through belief in Jesus just as much as any of its members.  We individually and we collectively are in need of repentance and forgiveness, and we can't avoid that reality by changing our vantage point or framing. 

By insisting that the church can't sin, it is closing the door to the primary vehicle for "making a new future possible."  A church that sets aside the assertion of its own sinlessness is positioned to become genuinely better, to genuinely move closer to God.  That principle has been proven time and again in the lives of millions of individual Christians.  Why wouldn't it apply to the church?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out of the church a
Read more

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Image
1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbation is going to result in those folks
Read more