Inform Your 'Faith'

    I have been ministering on the subjects of the supernatural conception and virgin birth over the past two Sunday's in anticipation of Advent; or Christmas depending on the phraseology preferred. (I prefer to use the word advent but will employ Christmas herein).  My aim was to prepare and equip the congregants with a biblical account of the very occasion we are suppose to be celebrating...the birth of the Christ child otherwise referred to as the incarnation. 

    In so doing I have given much preponderance to "how" we actually celebrate and memorialize that most incomprehensibly stupendous historical event this side of creation ex nihilo.  I must say as I mulled this over the disappointment was unavoidable and overwhelming.  I fear the Church has incorporated so much extraneous family "tradition" in the name of being festive that Christmas has been reduced to a reason to indulge in vanity and meaningless gift giving.  I would even say it has devolved into an occasion of nostalgic gluttony.

    Christians have become so consumed with unwrapping their newest toy or material craving that the most invaluable gift of all has been virtually displaced from their "seasonal" consciousness.  I am not sure that what most households now acknowledge each year around the 25th of December constitutes a "holiday" in any sense of the word.  I say this with much antipathy.

    C.S. Lewis expresses his dissatisfaction with this very dreary business we have made Christmas to be through an excerpt of Herodotus titled "Xmas and Christmas..A lost chapter from Herodotus".  In so doing he evinces the absurdity of blending practices or traditions associated with "Exmas" with "Crissmas".  The latter tradition had integrated so much of the former tradition into its practice that the two were said to be the same, or at least indistinguishable.   The piece concludes with, "But what Hecataeus says, that Exmas and Crissmas are the same, is not credible. For first, the pictures which are stamped on Exmas-cards have nothing to do with the sacred story which the priests tell about Crissmas.  In much the same way the Church has busied itself with exchanging "Exmas" cards along with its unrelated sentiments instead of exchanging or highlighting the sacred story of "Crissmas".  In so doing  the "Crissmas" story has been rendered irrelevant or is treated as an antiquated narrative/mythos

    The Church (by Church I do not mean the visible church "institution" but the respective confessors of Christ who comprise the Church; i.e. all Christians) needs to recapture and reclaim the historical and spiritual significance of the birth of Christ. We should be "gifting" the meaning of the incarnation and bringing this to mind as we celebrate Christmas. This birth signifies the movement of divinity amongst mankind; the very movement prognosticated by the prophets of old finding actualization. It is the very event that alters history essentially dividing all of human history into two prolonged epochs respectively....A.D. and B.C.

    Who is this child and what does His advent concomitantly mean?  As Luke records in his gospel account, " For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, Christ the Lord."  This is no trivial or mundane statement by the angelic figure.  This "child" is nothing less than the four titles just ascribed to Him: King, Savior, Christ, Lord. This "child" is acknowledged by the angelic host as establishing "peace" for those in whom He is well pleased. This is what should be "unwrapped" at Christmas as it were.  The celebratory and reverential posture of the angelic host, the shepherds, the wise men et cetera should be what we aim to emulate and exemplify.

  Our Christmas traditions, reflections and priorities should revolve around these two aforementioned questions....................Who is this "child" and what does His advent concomitantly mean?  Albeit in much more detail.

    Original sin, by and large, is not a much contested biblical conception.  Though the doctrine has been assailed by some throughout redemptive history it has withstood the perverse calumnies of them all and has been preserved within the bounds of orthodoxy  respectfully. 

    Of late and recent the proponents of a "liberal orthodoxy" have advanced a particularly imaginative formulation of original sin as a more or less environmental or communal phenomenon.  Modern theology of this sort redefines "sin" merely in terms of individual acts of sin.  Karl Barth the "father of liberal orthodoxy" or "neo-orthodoxy" exchanged inherited sin for the "life act".  This meant that the acts of sin perpetrated by individuals formatively constructs the environment or atmosphere of all individual existence.  Within this conception of sin the external acts or movement of sin more or less create or better generate the environment of sin. A far cry from the reality of the corruptive pulse intrinsic within mankind creating the sinful culture according to the Christological and Pauline formula of original sin.  Others such as Immanuel Kant and Frederich Sclheiermacher propound doctrines of sin along these modernistic notions with their own respective variations.  Space will not permit a more trenchant treatment of these fallacies.  Suffice it to say these liberal postulations espouse sin to have an extrinsic or external origin and influence after the fall of Adam.  They assign the individualistic expressions of sin to individualistic impressions of sin imposed on the individual from the communal or environmental nexus.  The individual becomes evil as he is enveloped by his sinful communal surroundings.  As Wolfhart Pannenberg describes it, "In this case the individual will not regard the self as intrinsically evil. Evil will seem to be a structural sin apart from the individual."

   To be sure Christ eschewed such assertions of structural externalism in an exchange with the Pharisee's when he posited, "it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person but what comes out of the mouth that defiles a person...For out of the heart comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality,theft, false witness, slander" (Matt. 15:10-20).  It would seem that this Phariseeical fallacy has simply morphed into a more sophisticated form in our day of what Christ rejected in His day. 

    Interesting corollary's can be drawn from the conception of sin impinging upon individuals from the external construct of "environment", "social setting", "community" et al. and the definition of sin extrinsically,  within the Pelagian and liberal ideologies and the religion of the Phariseeical caste or order who themselves withdrew from the ranks of the Israelitic middle-class citizenry for reasons of external purism.  Just as "sin" is solely defined in terms of extrinsic and external categories by the former so it was with the Pharisee. This was the crux of the self-righteous Pharisee! They didn't perceive themselves as inherently or intrinsically sinful.  They did not view themselves as sinners! This is ostensibly why Christ retorted to the Pharisees, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick...For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners." (Matt.9:10-13) This reply was on the heels of the Pharisees inquiry, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"  They apparently did not place themselves in the category of sinner.  Because their idea of "sin" was defined in external categories alone they could not recognize themselves as sinners; they would not and they did not (with the probable exception of Nicodemus).

    This is of course categorically opposed to the biblical reality of the universality of sin and its source or origination.  As Pannenberg says, "We have to recognize that the evil of sin is our own evil, whether as our own act of or as the power that dwells within us. Sin has its origin in the individual "heart".

  The biblical conception of sin is two fold - actual sin, original sin- and cannot be separated from its anthropology. Sinners sin! Sin cannot be separated from the subject and be treated as a static object existing in isolation.  Sin does not sin. Even when sin is treated as a power of sorts it is treated as a power working within humanity not so much outside of it. Biblically speaking sin finds its existence and expression vis a vis personification.  As Paul advances in Romans, "All have sinned." (3:23) and later "through one man sin entered the world" (5:12).  His concern regarding sin is not in abstracting this evil power or bondage from the anthropological palette.  Mankind is culpable of committing actual sins.  The activity of sin finds its entrance into the human drama through Adam. 

   The actual sins mankind commits bespeak a participation in sin.  This is true however not because of some external evil impinging upon it; but because of sin emerging from within it; an internal evil en toto  The reality and activity of sin finds its actualization and realization because of the corruption of the human condition.  This condition was inherited from our primordial progenitor...Adam.  Again, "through one man (Adam) sin entered the world." (Rom.5:12) 

    The conception of mankind being in Adam or present in Adam when the first sin was committed is conceptionally solid and valid.  The technical articulation by Augustine was misguided.  Paul does recognize Adam as a representation or representative of humanity.  He speaks of Adam as "a type of Him who was to come" (Rom.5:14) and establishes Adam as the first man whose image all mankind bears with Christ being the "last Adam" whose image those that are heavenly bear. (see I Cor.15:42-49)  Adam as original sinner by whom, "many were made sinners" should be understood in terms of corporate or collective solidarity.  As Pannenberg acknowledges, "As the first sinner, Adam is the original of all of us in our sinning."  II Esdras reflects this doctrinal course, "O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone but ours also who are your descendants"

    The Pauline development of this conception of original sin identifies Adams progeny with him to such an extent he explicitly asserts that though death spread to all men because of the one man, Adam (Rom.5:12a,b,c), nevertheless, "death spread to all men, because all sinned." (Rom.5:12d,e)  Paul does inextricably locate the entirety of humanity that proliferates from Adam within his person as prototypical.  He is so acute in so doing that the warp and woof of humanity is present during the original sin because Adam is humankind. In fact the the word Adam in Hebrew means mankind. F.F. Bruce posits, "It is not simply because Adam is the ancestor of mankind that all are said to have sinned in his sin; it is because Adam is mankind," and, "To Paul...The whole of humanity is viewed as having existed first in Adam."  This is true for Paul, as it particularly resonated within his doctrinal phraseology, because of the prevalence of the Hebrew dynamic of corporate personality.  This again underscores the necessity of handling original sin within the parameters and verbiage of corporate solidarity.  The challenge in preserving this in our day is in no small measure because of the individualistic epistemological  matrix we have adopted from the enlightenment culture of thought. The doctrine of actual sins would be subsumed under a more individualistic analysis whereas the doctrine of original sin should be treated from a more corporate or collective analysis for, "sin does not consist merely of individual offenses. Nor can we trace it back to these.  It precedes all human acts as a power that dwells in us, that possesses us like our own subjectivity as it overpowers us.  It is a state of alienation from God. Yet this alienation does not come about without our own cooperation and therefore our own - even if divided - consent." (Pannenberg) 

    The power and bondage of sin ensnares all of humanity unless or until they, "bear the image of the heavenly Man." (I Cor.15:49)  at which juncture they are set free from the bondage of sin.  Prior to this human nature is radically depraved.  This thoroughgoing corruption of mankind's nature, i.e. original sin, derived from Adam though is not a corruption of the essence or substance of the soul. As the Formula of Concord states, "That although original sin corrupts our whole nature, yet the essence or substance of the soul is one thing, and original sin another."

Synod of Dort, Art.III : Man after the fall begat children in his own likeness. A corrupt stock produced a corrupt offspring. Hence all the posterity of Adam, Christ only excepted, have derived corruption from their original parent...by the propagation of a vicious nature.....

Credo ut Intelligam