Sin is not a popular notion or subject today, at least in the corridors of mostly lib­eral and secular society where I walk most of the time. The church and denomination my family attends finds the idea much too gloomy and negative - it doesn't help people "feel good" - it is lacking in positive think­ing. (And someone told me that the word hadn't been heard in the Lincoln Unitarian Church in over 30 years - but I don't believe it!)

    Tom Carroll's {Torch Club] rule for a Torch paper is that you shouldn't speak about your own work, and while I don't regard sin as exactly my work (some of the more conservative campus pastors would disagree), I am re­minded of that wonderful old New Yorker cartoon which shows two amply upholstered clergymen, sitting in equally well-uphol­stered club chairs, obviously enjoying their afternoon sherry. One is saying to the other, "Have you ever thought where we might be, if it wasn't for sin?"

    The only New Yorker cartoon I like bet­ter is the one in which your well-dressed couple, basic American/Republican stock, are walking away from the church, just after services have let out. In the background you can see the minister at the door greeting his exiting flock. And the husband is saying to his wife, obviously referring to the minis­ter, "He does pretty well, considering how easy it is to offend people like us."

    The title of this paper comes, of course, from the story in Genesis 3, the so-called story of the Fall, where sin is related to eat­ing of the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent entices the woman with the suggestion of becoming like God - eternal and wise, and she, thinking that might not be a bad idea -and besides the fruit does look good to eat -eats, and then gives it to the man and then he eats. And it's all downhill for a long time after that!

    Actually, among other things, the story is a great piece of ironic humor in its contrast between expectation and reality:

"But the serpent said to the woman, "You will die; for God knows when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her hus­band, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew—that they were naked! (Genesis 3:4-7a N RSV)

    The reference to the pear has nothing substantial to do with the content of this paper, except to note, as my medievalist daughter tells me, that over the centuries of commentary on this story, the fruit has been variously identified not just as an apple, but also as a pear, a fig, an orange, a date, a lemon, a pomegranate, and a quince; the apple, fig and pomegranate being the most popular choices. The choice of the fruit usually seems to derive from the influence of, or an appropriation of symbols from other belief systems or cultures.

    The fact that in Western culture at least, the idea of an apple gained ascendancy, may have to do with the medieval scholastic's proclivity for word games so that, in a bad Latin pun "apple" which is malum, gets con­nected with "evil," which is malus, or in the common accusative - malum.

But I stray.

    My aim is to give some, perhaps new, and useful meaning to the notion of Sin, as referring to a reality of importance in under­standing and coping with our lives. You will have to judge whether what I offer (and little of it is original with me) corresponds with your own human experience and understand­ing or not, and even if it does, whether it is helpful to use the word "sin" to cover the subject.

    It is my intent to use as little theological jargon as possible, and to use even biblical references not as authority, but as helpful illustration. In doing this I am trying to fol­low Martin Marty's dictum that when people of faith enter the public square, they should use publicly accessible arguments and lan­guage. Religious activists learn, or should learn quickly that you cannot win an argu­ment by saying, "God settled it!"

    I will also say in advance that many of my insights, such as they are, come with the help—whether always cited or not—of the philosophical theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich worked with at least two basic assumptions:

    The first he called the method of correlation. Theological affirmations should relate to existential questions—i.e. that we should not spend time providing answers for questions no one is asking, and the sec­ond was the conviction that in the modern, secular world, most if not all of traditional religious language, symbols and metaphors have lost their meaning, and so must be ei­ther re-interpreted, replaced, or forgotten.

    What are the usual ways of understand­ing the idea of sin?

    We understand it as actual acts of com­mission or, less often, of omission, that break the laws of God—thus the 10 command­ments, and the seven deadly sins—recently given shape in the film "Seven." Such acts can cover the whole range of human behav­ior and misbehavior, from the personal to the social, local to global, and on both the politi­cal, economic, and theological right and left. Generally one can note that the theological right tends to focus on the personal, with a fascination for the sexual, while the left fo­cuses on the social, embarrassed by the per­sonal and trying to avoid the sexual.

   That sin, as acts in violation of Godly authority, is for the most part individual. It is a question of individual action, individual responsibility, and individual guilt. We are not very comfortable with either the notion of inherited sin, or corporate guilt.

    Certainly, whatever one thinks about the idea of the "laws of God," there are acts done, and not done, by persons, including our­selves, that inflict hurt on persons, both in­dividually and corporately; acts that we as individuals chose to do, and for the results of which we bear some responsibility.

    But if this is all we have to say about sin, then we either make no sense, or a trivial sense of the "Fall" as portrayed in the Gen­esis narrative. We miss deep dimensions not only of the biblical narrative, but of nar­ratives in many cultures, and of our own human experience.

    I can symbolize the problem by suggest­ing the difference between the idea of "sins"—various listings of individuals acts; and "Sin"—with a capital S.

    Of "sins" the catalogue is endless, but not necessarily untrue. I would suggest that sins are any act, or failure to act, that do harm to persons, to relationships, or to the social and biological framework necessary for not only survival, but for human flour­ishing. And the harm involved may not even be present harm, but one emerging as a re­sult of our acts (or failures) in the near or distant future.

    In this sense, the "law of God" becomes not something arbitrary, without meaning other than the fiat of power but, in some sense "the way things work." Take, for ex­ample, the complex and fragile relationship between human life and the ecosphere, or some simple truths of experience about hu­man relationships and what is helpful to them, and what is not.

    I believe that there are few, if any, acts or failures to act which are absolutely wrong, that is, sinful, in every circumstance. Jo­seph Fletcher, in his book on Situation Eth­ics, probably the most criticized unread book in 20th century ethics, lays waste to the no­tion of a principled ethics which says, in ef­fect, "we should do right, no matter whom it hurts. (1)

    But I also believe that there are moral connections and structures in the universe, in all of its known and unknown multiplici­ties, which point us in certain directions and to values which we need to share, if we are to live with each other and in the universe with any kind of quality of personal and com­munal life. Though I would also make haste to say that even survival is, in itself, surely one of those non-absolute values, certainly at the individual level.

    And, if there is damage done by our acts or failures to act, because we have violated those connections or values, then there is certainly substantive guilt involved—whether the harm was meant or unintended, known or unknown, or even when you did the best you could at the time. Here is where I part company with Fletcher who links guilt to motivation, and says, when you have done the best you can, then there is no guilt. But if the focus is on the actual damage done, then even our best can bring responsibility and guilt.

    But having said this about "sins," acts of commission or omission that do damage, that have real victims, we still have not touched the depth of what I understand of the idea if-Sin,- Capital S.

    The narrative of Genesis 3 and follow­ing, is trivialized when it is understood as the acts of two individuals who thereby in­cur guilt, and whose guilt is somehow passed on to their offspring.

    It is rather a narrative which, in good Tillichian fashion, responds to a very hu­man question, "Why is the world this way?" Or in somewhat different form, -What went wrong?"

    Both questions are the result of the equally human observation about the ways of the world and of human life—that things could be better.
If you think religiously, you may ask, "What went wrong?" implying something better must have been intended, and so in some fashion you tell stories about a good creation, and of a "fall" from that goodness.

    Or, religious or not, you may look ahead and ask, "how can things change from the way they are, how can they get better?" And then you tell stories about progress, or the historical dialectic, or dream visions of a peaceable kingdom, or of a heavenly city, where "mourning and crying and pain will be no more." (Revelation 21:1-4 NSRV)

    Note that none of these questions, and none of the stories suggest that what we see and experience in the life of the world, at either the personal or corporate level, is to be accepted as the norm. Rather than being simply an accepted reflection of what is, the human norm is about always a function of a dream of the better. One might suggest that one of the true miracles of human history is that we still have the capacity to dream of a peaceable kingdom, to envision a world of shalom, in a world where there is so little to encourage such dreaming.

    In this context then, sin is more than an act, or the accumulation of acts. It is rather a description of the human condition, the con­dition which we experience and ask of it how can it be better?

    It is in this context that I read Paul's letters, not always my favorite biblical re­source, and find that he never speaks of sin in the plural, but always in the singular. And he talks about a personal condition which he likens to slavery, in which the things he would do, he does not do, and that which he would not do, he does anyway, and then cries for delivery from what he calls "This body of death." (Roman 7:14-24 NRSV) And even more broadly, he speaks of the whole of creation which groans, awaiting its re­demption, its freedom from bondage. (Ro­man 8:22-23 NRSV)

    Is this just gloomy, self-justifying clap­trap? Does none of this speak to our own human experience, even if we could describe it in other ways?

    At the personal level, have you ever experienced, as I certainly have, those times in relationships when you knew perfectly well what needed to be done, but just could not bring yourself to say the right thing, or to do it, even knowing that failure to speak, or speaking the hurtful thing, was doing deep damage to one for whom you cared? Moving beyond the personal, what do we make of the powers of racism, of militarism, of war, of the holocaust, of the genocide of the native American population by our an­cestors, of destructive, blind consumerism, of the systematic rape of the earth and its resources, which we still insist on justify­ing?

    I can still remember the sense of dum­founding revelation I felt, in my first parish out of seminary, on the agricultural lands of southern Minnesota, when I rejoiced with our people when the prices for their cattle suddenly rose to the point where they were making a small profit; and then discovered that the reason for the change lay in a killing freeze in the cattlelands of Florida, in which the livestock were destroyed and the living of many families there was laid waste. It was clear to me that this had something to do with the meaning of Sin, but with no sinners to point to!

    Tillich, following earlier philosophers of the 19th century, referred to this human con­dition as rooted in alienation, or in a kind of cosmic brokenness, and suggested that this is what theologians have meant, at the most basic level, when they have talked about Sin. That there is in the midst of human life a condition, whatever you may say about its cause, that is more than acts or failures to act. It is a condition which is beyond the control of any person, or even generation, to fundamentally change. It is a condition experienced by us as separation or alienation, from our best selves, from one another, and from a healthy relationship even with the earth on which we live. And we are all in­volved in it and affected by it, simply by the fact that we exist. In this sense, and in this sense only, Augustine was right in talking about Sin being passed from generation to generation. Not, as he suggested, because of sex. (He read everything from the per­spective of his lusty youth and his world-negating neoplatonism), but because the human condition comes to life. There is, in this sense, no innocence.

    Hear some of Tillich directly, from his famous sermon "You Are accepted":

Have humans of our time still a feeling of the meaning of sin? Do they, and do we, sill realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that "sin" should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-per­vading problem of our life?....Sin is separation. To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation...separation constitutes the state of everything that exists; it is a universal fact; it is the fate of every life. Such separation is pre­pared in the mother's womb, and before that time, in every preced­ing generation. It is manifest in the special actions and experiences of our conscious personal and corpo­rate life. It reaches beyond our graves into all the succeeding gen­erations. It is our existence itself...Before sin is an act, it is a state. (2)

    And the human condition is not just the systems of distorted relationships and insti­tutions and cultural patterns which do so much damage, but it is also the pain, the hurt, the groaning of heart and mind and body that is the result of the damage done. We are victims and victimizers. Very often, we experience and live and act as something of both.

    Thus sin, and guilt, are fundamentally corporate. The so-called sins, large and small, are, in this sense, but symptoms of the basic human condition in which we all share, all suffer from, all share in causing others to suffer or to profit from the suffering of oth­ers.

    Even our attempts to better things, from revolutions to simple development of new laws or policies, too often suffer from the realities of alienation we bring to the at­tempts, the corruption of power, pledged to be used for good. We often fail to feel the hurt of others unlike us, even as we try to help. There is a tendency to separate the world into white hats and black hats, to point at, seek out, and attack the demons outside, the Communists, the secular humanists, the raving fundamentalists. We rarely hear the warning of Ghandi that the real demons are always within.

    This human condition, which I suggest is what has been meant when sin is seriously considered, involves us all together. If it were only individual, we could too easily fall into the game of thinking that our problems would be over if only we could find all the sinners and lock them up, execute them, or convert them. So more for defense, more for police, more for jails, more deaths, and more evangelistic campaigns! There is no sinner class. As Walt Kelly's Pogo said so well, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Sin, in this sense, moves us out of the realm of simple moralities, into a realm of Kierkegaardian paradox: humanity both free
and bound; sin as not necessary but inevi­table. The place where both the grandeur of being human and its despair, both our pos­sibilities for goodness, and the ambiguity, or even corruption of our attempts to be good, stand side by side.

    One is reminded of the classic formula­tion of Reinhold Niebuhr, that the human capacity for justice makes democracy pos­sible, and the human proclivity for injustice makes democracy necessary. (3)

    This is not, I submit, simply a gloomy, despairing view of the human situation. While I believe it to accord with my own experience, and with that of most people I talk to, that it does not deny the existence of human grace and goodness are always im­perfect, and that often the reason they stand out is because of the deep, systemic bro­kenness of personal and corporate spirit, against which they occur. So both Anne Frank's optimism about human nature, and the work of Schindler and his saving list, are lights of grace against all the holocausts and genocides of human history. And the work of Mother Teresa and her followers shines against the background of deep-rooted and resistent systems of grinding poverty and human misery.

    I have, for instance, a belief that an eco­nomic system whose health absolutely seems to depend on a good percentage of underemployed or unemployed people, or where so much of economic gain in one place or time is bought at devastating loss in an­other, is fundamentally wrong. But I also know, from history, that attempts at funda­mental change by law or revolution may well crash on the rocks of good intentions that lead to worse conditions.

    Hear Tillich again:

We cannot escape...we are bound to ourselves and to all other life. We always remain in the power of that from which we are estranged. That fact brings us to the ultimate depth of sin: separate and yet bound, estranged and yet belong­ing, destroyed and yet preserved...The abyss of separation is not always visible. But it has become more visible to our genera­tion than to the preceding genera­tions, because of our feeling of meaninglessness, emptiness, hope­lessness, doubt, and cynicisms—all expressions of our separation from the roots and meaning of our life. (4)

    Well, I don't know if I have made my case, even a little bit. I have not addressed the issue of the human causes or roots of this condition we call sin. I believe that in some sense it has developed over the his­tory of human life, and within our own per­sonal lives, out of our very human need to be in control of things and out of our very human wish to transcend the limits of our humanness - our mortality, our dependence on so much that is beyond our control.

    Daniel Quinn in his provocative book, Ishmael, suggests that the Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel stories are really about that time in human history when we moved from being basically hunters and gatherers, what he calls "Leavers," and began agricul­ture-based living, the society which he calls "The Takers." Instead of living with the ebb and flow of natural resources, moving where there is food, and leaving when there is none, and maintaining that size of population that is sustainable at that level, we seek to guar­antee our food supply, always needing more, then supporting a larger population, need­ing more again, and so on, to destruction. And out of this ultimately destructive sys­tem, and the myths which call it progress, comes the conditions of alienation. (5)

    That's a whole different paper or more than one.

    Nor have 1 even suggested what, if any, is the remedy or cure for our condition. Tillich's sermons always move from the real­ity of sin to that of grace—grace as the pos­sibility of reunion and reconciliation. But that would move from analysis to preach­ing, which is not appropriate for this venue even if 1 had a conviction about some single answer. My modest suspicion is that we only ameliorate, never cure. Human nature and history are larger that our abilities, con­stricted and limited as they are, to funda­mentally change. What is it that Isaiah Ber­lin said, in quoting Immanuel Kant? "Of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight can ever be made." (6)

    But I think it important to continue to dream dreams of better things, and to seek with modesty and humility (wouldn't those be new thoughts for out politicians) to change what we can, making no great claims to social cure. Expand our capabilities to feel with and for one another, to walk in the shoes and stand in the places of others who are different. And to know that always, for better or worse, we are all in it together—this generation and all those to come. We can decrease our sins, with effort, even if we cannot cure the basic condition. And we can call that condition for what it is, whether the word is sin, or alienation, or brokenness or separation, or just the accumulated en­tanglements of choices, good and bad, made by countless generations of mortal beings, too often trying to find immortality, and find it at whatever the cost to self, others, or the earth.


1.    Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics. Westminster, Philadelphia. 1966
2.    Paul Tillich, "You Are Expected" in Shak­ing the Foundations. Scribners, New York, 1948. p.154f.
3.    Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. Scribners, New York. 1944. p.xi.
4.    Tillich, op cit. p.159f
5.    Daniel Quinn, Ishmael. Bantam, New York, 1991. esp. Part Nine, pp.151-184.
6.    Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Knopf, New York, 1991. pp.vii and xi.


    The Rev. Larry Doerr is a Presbyterian minister, ordained in Minneapolis, Minne­sota 41 years ago [as of 1997].  He was graduated from Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota in 1953 with a B.A. in His­tory, and from Union Theological Seminary, New York City, in 1956 with a M.Div. in The­ology and History. After four years in a three-church rural parish in southern Min­nesota, he entered campus ministry at the University of Minnesota where he served for ten years, including two years of doc­toral work on the Social History of American Religion. He and his family moved to Lin­coln in 1970 where he worked on the staff of United Ministries in Higher Education until his retirement in September of 1996. He notes, "I was fortunate enough to have my semi­nary training at Union Seminary during the tenures of such theological giants as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and their thought still animates much of my own work and ideas today.

This article is a reprint from the Winter-1997-1998 issue of the Torch Magazine.