The Nature of Sin

In our discussion today, we spent a great deal of time talking about Wendy Farley’s concept of sin. She makes the claim that humans are not born sinful but rather they are predisposed to certain desires; it is when these desires become warped or distorted that a wrong is committed. She talks about how love for instance, while by nature is something good, becomes harmful when people forget themselves in their sole focus on others. While I do not disagree with this concept, I do argue with the idea that this is somehow radically different from the orthodox view on sin. I find Wendy Farley’s description of sin to be, for the most part, in congruence with the Catholic Church’s own teachings. I can demonstrate this point with my own experiences going to Catholic school and growing up in a conservative Catholic family. When I was in high school, for instance, one of the sections in my theology text book dealt with relationships and how to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy ones. My teacher talked about how reaching out to others and compassion were important traits, but that one must also not entirely forget one’s self. The most important commandment in the Bible is basically to “love others as oneself”. The Church then does not instruct people to forget their own needs; rather, they want to remind people that they should have compassion towards others. It is for this reason that I think Wendy Farley’s concept of sin is not something completely new. The church has always seen sin as this distortion of desire; Priests have always instructed people against taking something deemed good or virtuous too far. Although they see self-sacrifice as an ultimate good, they do not condone the total abandonment of oneself to the point in which it is harmful. While Farley and the Church disagree about this idea of original sin, I think they are remarkably similar otherwise.

With this in mind, I have to say that I still prefer the orthodox view on sin to the different alternatives posed by the various authors. Although I find Farley’s beliefs to be similar to those found in the Catholic Church, I prefer the concept of original sin over Farley’s belief in the paradoxical nature of humankind. This is so for one main reason. To begin with, I find Farley’s idea problematic, because it does not adequately answer this idea of suffering. In the Catholic tradition, humans suffer because they transgressed against God. In Farley’s argument, on the other hand, people suffer because suffering simply exists; there is no reason for it and it is just a part of life. If this is true, there is no point or meaning to the pain found in life. I have always viewed suffering (albeit a healthy amount) as something useful because it shows people how to be truly human; it teaches one how to be sympathetic towards others and how to appreciate God’s gifts to humanity. Humans therefore suffer because we have done something wrong and we can use this pain as a tool for instruction. Farley’s view disconcerts me then because I feel that, under her logic, my sufferings would not have the same type of purpose. I am more comforted by the notion then, perhaps strangely so, by the fact that my suffering is caused by human sin rather than something inherent in creation. I want my struggles in life to have some sort of meaning to it. When all is said and done, I prefer the traditional view on sin because it makes more sense to me.