The biology of sin
Sin is one of those theological words that I wonder about
sometimes. That is, should we relegate to the literary
graveyard where words that have outlived their usefulness go
to die? I mean, this is the 21st century. Some of my
progressive Christian friends believe that all faith language
is a barrier to inclusion. Newcomers checking out church
shouldn’t have to deal with the “night” language of faith.
“Trinity”, “eschatology”, “Pentecost”, “God”, “Christ”, are
nothing more than secret code for insiders that outsiders
shouldn’t have to learn before feeling like they belong.
But my own sense is that people actually expect to enter a
culture different than the one they live in six days a week,
and along with this comes new language. There are ways to
present our metaphors and symbols that suggest a realm of
Mystery with which the modern world is largely unacquainted
and hungers for.
That said, the word and the concept of “sin” may be so loaded
with negative associations that it’s beyond “redemption”.
“Sin” is a translation of the Greek word “hamartia”, which
means “missing the mark”. Now that’s a pretty rich metaphor
that any preacher worth her salt could sink her teeth into
without alienating most listeners. There’s another word,
“alienation”, that is useful when it comes to understanding
sin: sin is the state of alienation from Reality, self,
neighbour, and Earth. Sin is not, in the first place, a list
of discrete acts of wrongdoing that I confess on Sunday
morning. Still, even with all this word smithing, the jury is
out on the usefulness of “sin” as a theological concept.
The problem arises from our historical, pre-scientific,
attempts to understand the source of our alienation.
Traditionally, sin has been understood as a fall from grace.
The primal couple once existed in a state of perfect harmony
and bliss. Then they disobeyed God, and were kicked out of
Eden, to toil in, and till, the hard soil of life. Death
itself was imagined to be a result of their primal
disobedience.
Even after we started to understand this in a mythological,
non-literal sense, a thought-meme remained lodged in our
consciousness of a state of original perfection from which
we’ve fallen. We romantically located this state of perfect
union with the divine in infants, who came into this world
“trailing clouds of glory”, fresh from God, and then as the
years past became increasingly separated from an original
union. (This is actually correct in the limited sense that we
all emerged from a non-dual womb of infinite potential, but
once we are actually embryonic we start the evolutionary march
from scratch — from undifferentiated union with mother to an
individuated soul capable of consciously realizing our unity
with all.) We are, as Wilber puts it, “moving up from Eden”,
Believe it or not, I still get parents (typically, Roman
Catholic background)
who want to baptize their children
because they are harbouring an ancient fear that, God forbid,
if something should happen to their baby s/he would be with
God. The baptism is a magical ritual that removes sin, and
makes their baby a child of God who happily receives only
baptized souls. Yes, it’s superstitious, and the parents know
it, but just in case…
My friends Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, itinerant
evangelists of evolution, are doing humanity a great service
in pointing out the biological explanation of “sin”. We have
four brains stacked on top of each other, the evolutionary
gift of reptiles, mammals, and homo sapiens sapiens. Our
reptilian brain is hard wired for safety, sex, and sustenance.
That’s all it cares about. Our mammalian brain is wired for
kinship, reciprocity, status, and our neo-mammalian/early
human brain helps us to interpret, predict, and comprehend.
Our prefrontal lobes are what distinguishes humans from other
mammals and are associated with feelings of unity and
spirituality.
When Paul wrote that he was a man undone because the good
things he wanted to do he didn’t do, and the evil things he
would refrain from doing he does, he had no understanding of
the human brain or biochemistry (Romans 6: 12-14). The war he
thought that was going on between his “members” was actually
going on between his ears. We want sex. We want fat, sugar,
and salt. We want status. And before our rational mind can
kick in, we’re downloading porn, gawking at a beautiful woman,
pumping up our status by telling little white lies, or
finishing off another bag of potato chips.
Are we “sinners”?
No, we’ve been hijacked by ancient instincts and impulses
without which we wouldn’t be here. So we can learn to be
grateful for these instincts, rather than compulsively
denigrating ourselves. Evolutionarily speaking, these impulses
are within us, and they ain’t going away. They are part of the
reality that is us, and we need to learn to go beyond simply
accepting them, to actually being grateful for them.
That doesn’t mean that we’re not responsible for managing
them. We are in control. The devil never made anybody do
anything and neither do our instincts, hormones, or our early
brains. Through psychological awareness and spiritual practice
we develop a witnessing relationship to our drive for sex,
food, status, and security. We have these impulses, but we are
not these impulses.
Interesting isn’t it, that these are precisely what Jesus is
portrayed as dealing with in the wilderness when he was
tempted by Satan? Ok, so the Bible story omits the sexual
temptation, but contemporary interpretations of the life of
Jesus were astute enough to have Satan show up in a short
skirt and stiletto heals. Jesus was flesh and blood, an
evolutionary creature, and therefore had to deal with what the
early church desert fathers thought of as “demons”. When Paul
was riffing on sin (Romans 4), he also imagined sin to be an
external power that mysteriously possessed him. For him,
Christ was the solution to expunging this foreign power. But
now we know that “sin” is not an external force. It’s an
inside job.
By bringing his ancient instincts and impulses into conscious
awareness (the story-tellers personify sin as Satan – again an
external force), Jesus developed a witnessing relationship
with them, and in doing so was able to transcend them. But
these never actually disappear do they? Paul discovered this
to be true in the early church communities. Notice how he’s
always telling them to stop acting like they are under the
power of sin. These impulses, as mentioned, aren’t going
anywhere and we wouldn’t want them to. They are an
evolutionary gift and we will need them throughout our life.
So, we’re not sinners and we don’t exist in a state of sin. We
are creatures constructed over vast amounts of time from our
geological, biological, and human ancestors, both inside and
out. To be “in Christ” is to know oneself to be one with All
That Is (including our instincts). The illusion of
separateness dissolves and we discover ourselves to be
intimately related to the whole shebang. In fact, we discover
ourselves to be the part that presences the Whole.
This gnosis (firsthand knowing) is the strategy for dealing
with “sin”. It enables us to integrate our earlier adaptive
mechanisms and processes in a conscious way, and even use them
in the service of Spirit. For example the instinct to
procreate is “sanctified” by gnosis and is expressed as the
spiritual impulse to co-create. (Thanks Barbara Marx
Hubbard). Our security needs become grounded, not in the mad
scramble for more stuff or the perfect and ever-elusive
partner, but rather in the sacred, evolutionary power that
brought forth a universe. Even our thought processes, usually
harnessed to justify the defence system of our small self, are
now liberated by Higher, Intuitive Mind. Christ does set us
free, not by expunging our “lower” or earlier nature, but by a
love that allures us into our Big, Cosmic identity.