It happens rarely, especially these days, that people change their minds. Yet it happens.
Years ago, in a discussion no longer remembered, my ex-brother-in-law mentioned Pensacola Christian College, which offers thousands of students a Christian evangelical higher education. I visited its website and read its “Biblical Foundations.” Only one of its statements of faith surprised me: the world was created 6000 years ago. Absurd. A specified age ignores the passage of time; a world 6000 years old in 2020 will be the world 6001 years old in 2021—and so on and on.
My letter to PCC pointing out the problem received no reply. But, sometime later, revisiting its website, I found that PCC had amended its statement to read, “We reject the man-made theory of evolution occurring over millions of years and believe that the earth is approximately 6,000 years old (Gen. 5, 11).” To its credit, PPC accepted logic and made a correction; “approximately” is an improvement because it avoids dogmatic rigidity about the earth’s age. The improvement is temporary, however, because enough years will stretch “approximately” too far. Is the earth “approximately 6000 years” old in 2221? In 2521? And so on.
Although PCC was flexible enough to amend a statement of faith, it still did not think through the problem. The alternative solution is a specific date for the creation from which to count years. PPC might have picked the evening before 23 October 4004 B.C., the date proposed by Irish Archbishop James Ussher, accepted in many fundamentalist theological circles, though ridiculed outside them. PPC could keep its faith in a world getting older but remaining millions or billions of years younger than the age postulated by biological or astronomical evolution.
My criticism of an embarrassing miscue and an ineffectual response is not intended as a cheap shot at PCC or evangelical Christianity. I am simply instancing that, when careful thinking and writing are necessary, especially in matters essential to faith, it is not often or easily done, and miscues are seldom amended. Indeed, I credit PCC with trying, though it still has more to do. Despite its belief in the earth’s age as foundational to faith, PCC is unlikely to persuade others that its age has theological significance.
However, other theological issues raise problems on points of essential doctrine with no logical or likely resolutions. One Christian essential is the origin and nature of sin. Paul’s famous statement in Romans is brief: “if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’” (7:7). What Paul means by “known” we interpret as “perceived” or “experienced.” What he means by “law” is Jewish law, which, he claims, causes sin.
Understandably, Christians have an antipathy to the concept or practice of Jewish law. Two members of Peace Lutheran angrily asked me why Jews needed so many laws and why they could not be content with the Ten Commandments. And Pope Francis has declared Jewish law dead if it does not lead to Jesus Christ. My response to their anti-Judaism is not to redefine Christianity, but to show some problems in Paul’s claim.
The first problem is that his example does not exemplify the commandments or, more generally, Jewish law. The commandment proscribing covetousness is the only one which proscribes an emotion. Traditional Jewish thinking might regard it as a thin picket in the “fence around the Torah,” here, its commandment not to steal. To the innocent, simply desiring something belonging to another is not perceived as a sin if it does not lead to stealing. Only if the desire is perceived as a precursor to stealing can it be perceived as a sin. But, since the desire does not lead invariably, as cause to effect, to stealing, it cannot be a sin. Prohibitions of emotions as well as actions as sins are naïve because emotions are very difficult to control and virtually impossible to eradicate. (Jesus muddled the issue when he equated lusting in the heart and adultery. No one says stop lusting; everyone says take a cold shower.)
The atypicality and uselessness of Paul’s instance appears by contrast with the other commandments, all nine either stipulations or injunctions about actions. In human history, individuals or societies never perceived or experienced murder as acceptable until someone came along and pronounced it sinful. With few exceptions, people are not prompted to commit murder because the law forbids it. Try this substitute: “I would not have known what it is to murder if the law had not said, ‘You shall not murder’.” Really? Likewise with the other commandments and other Jewish laws. Paul notwithstanding, laws evolve from events perceived or experienced as having undesirable consequences and later established as crimes or, if you will, sins. But Paul does not so will; for him, sin is not an outward, avoidable or preventable crime atonable so much as it is an inward, inevitable stain indelible. God built sin into humankind’s spiritual DNA.
The second problem is that the one and only instance of law creating sin is God’s command to Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—which he might have done without His command and which God knew that he would do with it. Told not to eat cookies between meals, a child left alone will almost certainly do so. But even if not told not to eat them between meals, he is likely to do so. Paul is likely right that an instinct to violate the limits defined by laws is inherent if what is outside the limits is perceived or experienced as pleasurable or profitable—a temptation. I can accept the all-too-human motivation of this one prohibition. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain states, “For we were little Christian children, and early learned the value of forbidden fruit”—a nice spin, I think, on the Garden of Eden story. Paul assumes humankind’s childlike innocence until laws are learned, but, on the Genesis account, the period of innocence was short. It ended with God’s command and the temptation which Adam did not resist; truly, Satan did God’s work. Paul’s instance assumes human orneriness as the basis of sin, but most sins do not arise from orneriness.
Strictly speaking, Paul should blame God for rigging the situation by creating humans morally fixed in frailty. Or Paul should explain the purpose of theological yo-yoing: why did God create humans inherently sinful and then make them seek forgiveness for their sins. These questions can generate implacable resistance because they challenge core doctrine, and some answers would discredit, undermine faith, and unsettle Christians. Or it can allow Christians to continue wrestling with these questions or accept that God works in mysterious ways, and this essential doctrine is one of them.
Again, my point is not to disparage Christianity; it is to show that Christian doctrine about the law, if it follows Paul, is not without its problems. On his advice, Christians would reject the law, know it not, be free of sin, and need neither grace nor salvation. Jewish law also has its problems, but it also has an appealing reasonableness. It enjoins what does good and forbids what, though tempting, does harm. It addresses action, which people can regulate and control, not emotion, which they cannot, certainly not easily. It addresses what is humanly possible, not what depends on divine assistance. It allows Jews to believe that the reward for a good life lived by the law is a good life, not a life after death which allots promised rewards or threatened punishments.
I am certain not to change my mind, and I am equally certain that you are not going to change yours. But we can, I hope, agree that there is something to be said for cogency in the expression of our convictions and for respect for differences of faith.
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