As I described in my previous post, we do not observe--let alone understand--anything in its most basic elements. We experience symptoms of disease, but we can say only with relative certainty what are the underlying diseases in question--and we can never expect to plumb to the ultimate depths the physical realities that reside within. So also with our tendencies to sin. We can understand ourselves to show symptoms of sinfulness, but--as I wrote before--we can no more understand the genesis of our sinfulness than we can understand the creation of evil, or indeed the creation of anything.
That our knowledge of anything is separated from that reality by the sensory and conceptualization limitations of our status as finite beings, is a truth kicked about often enough in religion-attendant debates. It seems apparent that the most common responses to this materialism-implicit argument consist usually of people's positioning themselves on either side of the metaphorical toggle-switch of deciding either, one, that our limitations preclude determined faith in a perfect being or, two, that determined faith must be understood as directed toward a perfect being reckoned by definition to be un-understandable and always beyond the limits of our conceptualizations.
Or people can say simply that they believe in God and know not why--rendering moot questions about what might be understood (and placing such a believer liable to criticisms from all sides--if indeed critics exist who might wish to exercise themselves so.) There is, however, an intrinsic element to "I believe in God and know not why" that might be of benefit to us all. This benefit is the effectual immunity of such a believer to the temptation, one, to wield the above-mentioned materialism-implicit argument so as to discount religious belief or, two, to shunt aside considerations of that argument as being disingenuous or as being contentious for its own sake. For indeed there are limitations to what we can know--or what we can even conceptualize--and once drawn across the threshold of the initial question of belief in God, these limitations are invaluable as considerations about how we can address such belief intelligibly.
As this blog must be directed, the very idea of humanity as prone to sin must be fleshed-out in a manner that considers always that the receding of our understandings toward this or that describable horizon is not to say that the underlying, perceptibly receding phenomenon actually conjoins with that horizon. Our most pertinent example of this phenomenon is the conceit that Genesis shows the beginning of human sin. "Sin," of course, is understood generally to be describable--a person commits this or that sin. For this reason I have determined that "shame" (or perhaps the smaller-yet-undeniably-shameful notion of "proto-sin") is the best way to describe the most infinitesimal of human sins.
And so we are presented with the temptation to delineate when sinfulness showed itself in human beings. Being unwilling or unable to contend with the idea of the human sin-state receding backwards into Adam's coalescing dust, the denominations comfort themselves with the notion that sin "entered history" or "entered the Garden" with the eating of the Forbidden Fruit. Of course, Eve might have had previous scurrilous conversation with the snake for twenty seconds or twenty million years, and in any such event she would have sinned before she ate and therefore SINNED, as the conventional "Fall" notion of the Forbidden Fruit would have it. What is more, both Adam and Eve were at every moment simultaneously limited in capacity and supplied with appetites. By definition, sin could not have entered human beings with the eating of the fruit, because without sin they would not be understandable as human beings.
And the Book of Genesis, inasmuch as it might be considered a text to be read so as to gain understanding, is to be reckoned as directed to making things increasingly understandable. That our sin-state, receding in any of our poor attempts at conceptualized retrospection, would arise at some incomprehensible time-nexus of a perfect Creation resulting in the course of an incomprehensibly-small time-increment to some incomprehensibly infinitesimal amount of sinfulness--that would be the business of God, and we would expect it to be scarcely understandable. That the patience of God would have some limitation (the dimensions of which would escape us) is scarcely surprising, and that this limitation of patience would be presented in the Episode of the Forbidden Fruit is merely the outworking of God's business. Certainly the idea of sin leading to punishment is being made blisteringly understandable. Simultaneously the realization that Genesis is about God, and not about the millennia-irrelevant (or at least distant and un-addressable) fate of Adam and Eve, is made available to us.
For a vast and tragic reality hangs over the conventional ruminations of Christianity. Believers in the Bible can scarcely deny that sin permeates human nature, and yet what we will permit or not in ourselves or in our fellow persons is a question that perversely we attach to the idea that people can do good or bad things. Is there something about "sin permeates human nature" that we do not understand? Jesus requires from us the levy of penitence and punishment befitting murderers because we think ill of our fellow humans. Jesus attaches to us the stain of faithlessness because we cannot order mountains to leap into the sea. Jesus demands of us that we see clearly the reality that surrounds us, and yet he extends to us no measure of tolerance as might be thought fitting considering our limitations as finite beings. We must be perfect.
We are not perfect because we are not God. We are permeated with shame because we are not God. I am not sorry for my clumsy stumbling upon calling this blog "Shame Appears," because we can either content ourselves with notions that we can detect before ourselves things that appear good or appear true, or we can confront ourselves and our lives with the presupposition that, wherever we look, shame appears.
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