Original Sin
One of my areas of greatest discomfort with Christian theology has been the concept of original sin. To say that human nature is inherently inclined towards the evil seemed to me unfair and inaccurate. Also, the score keeping seemed unfair as well: If you do something wrong, you get the blame, but if you do something right, only God gets the credit. You own your own flaws but not your own virtues.
Now I say all of this as a strict amateur, someone who has never studied Christian theology seriously, so please take it with a grain of salt. This is less an accurate portrayal of Christian theology than an outline of my own theological thinking.
For a long time I think I subscribed to an essentially optimistic view of human nature - that people are born essentially good, and if they gravitate towards bad behavior later in life it is because they were not provided the necessary nurturing and guidance in their childhood. I think this is a view fairly common among Unitarian Universalists.
I have to say at this point in my life I am fairly overwhelmed by the historical and contemporary evidence of humanity's capacity for evil and cruelity. There seems to be no bounds to the harm human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. At the same time, humanity has also proven capable of tremendous good and service to others. Empirically I don't know if we can say if human nature is inherently good or inherently bad. It is interesting to me that in my own personal day-to-day experience, I mostly encounter people who want to be good, who want to be positive members of society and want to be good family members and friends. The gap between the human nature I encounter and the human nature that is revealed by history is interesting and something I cannot entirely explain.
However as I become a keener observer of human nature, perhaps I have come around to some acceptance of the concept of original sin in a broader sense. Not in the sense that human beings inherently incline towards evil, or even selfishness. But rather that human beings inherently incline towards myopia - they tend towards seeing the world from a certain limited perspective, and they actively resist taking responsibility for the impact of their actions on others if it is not apparent from this myopic world view. Perhaps the relevant theological question is how do we become married to certain myopias? I think the theological aim of Unitarian Universalism, and of Christianity as well, is to set our world view to be one of kinship with all of humanity, and even all of creation. To see the entire human family as your own is so simple in concept and yet a continual struggle, perhaps even impossible, in practice.
But I do want to make one final counterpoint against the idea that the problem with humanity is original sin or some flavor of selfishness. Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of human nature is a person's ability to turn over a new leaf, to accept that a past path was harmful and to embrace a new path. But how does such a transformation take place? It seems to me the essence of such spiritual transformations, both in my personal experience and from stories that have been passed down, is a turn inwards towards greater self-knowledge. If we have a flawed nature, it is overcome not by embracing some external set of laws. Rather it is repaired by seeking our true nature located deeper within our true selves. This is the teaching of many a great spiritual teacher - Thomas Merton foremost comes to mind. I think he is the first to coin the term "true self" and "false self."
In other words, although we are flawed creatures, we are also inherently created worthy and whole. The capacity for good, the capacity for self-transformation, does not lay somewhere outside of us but is within us, it is part of the gift of our own nature. To me this is the greatest source of hope and the greatest blessing we are given. I don't have a name for this spiritual reality but it seems to me even more essential to a complete theology than the concept of original sin. Original integrity? Our primary spiritual task is to recover that true nature and to honor its highest callings.
It is ironic but it seems that the only cure to our myopia is to understand the distorted nature of our inherited points of view. We cannot transcend our myopia, we can only take fuller ownership of it and its limitations. There is no perfection within human nature, only greater integrity, greater embrace of the nature of our true selves.
Now I say all of this as a strict amateur, someone who has never studied Christian theology seriously, so please take it with a grain of salt. This is less an accurate portrayal of Christian theology than an outline of my own theological thinking.
For a long time I think I subscribed to an essentially optimistic view of human nature - that people are born essentially good, and if they gravitate towards bad behavior later in life it is because they were not provided the necessary nurturing and guidance in their childhood. I think this is a view fairly common among Unitarian Universalists.
I have to say at this point in my life I am fairly overwhelmed by the historical and contemporary evidence of humanity's capacity for evil and cruelity. There seems to be no bounds to the harm human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. At the same time, humanity has also proven capable of tremendous good and service to others. Empirically I don't know if we can say if human nature is inherently good or inherently bad. It is interesting to me that in my own personal day-to-day experience, I mostly encounter people who want to be good, who want to be positive members of society and want to be good family members and friends. The gap between the human nature I encounter and the human nature that is revealed by history is interesting and something I cannot entirely explain.
However as I become a keener observer of human nature, perhaps I have come around to some acceptance of the concept of original sin in a broader sense. Not in the sense that human beings inherently incline towards evil, or even selfishness. But rather that human beings inherently incline towards myopia - they tend towards seeing the world from a certain limited perspective, and they actively resist taking responsibility for the impact of their actions on others if it is not apparent from this myopic world view. Perhaps the relevant theological question is how do we become married to certain myopias? I think the theological aim of Unitarian Universalism, and of Christianity as well, is to set our world view to be one of kinship with all of humanity, and even all of creation. To see the entire human family as your own is so simple in concept and yet a continual struggle, perhaps even impossible, in practice.
But I do want to make one final counterpoint against the idea that the problem with humanity is original sin or some flavor of selfishness. Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of human nature is a person's ability to turn over a new leaf, to accept that a past path was harmful and to embrace a new path. But how does such a transformation take place? It seems to me the essence of such spiritual transformations, both in my personal experience and from stories that have been passed down, is a turn inwards towards greater self-knowledge. If we have a flawed nature, it is overcome not by embracing some external set of laws. Rather it is repaired by seeking our true nature located deeper within our true selves. This is the teaching of many a great spiritual teacher - Thomas Merton foremost comes to mind. I think he is the first to coin the term "true self" and "false self."
In other words, although we are flawed creatures, we are also inherently created worthy and whole. The capacity for good, the capacity for self-transformation, does not lay somewhere outside of us but is within us, it is part of the gift of our own nature. To me this is the greatest source of hope and the greatest blessing we are given. I don't have a name for this spiritual reality but it seems to me even more essential to a complete theology than the concept of original sin. Original integrity? Our primary spiritual task is to recover that true nature and to honor its highest callings.
It is ironic but it seems that the only cure to our myopia is to understand the distorted nature of our inherited points of view. We cannot transcend our myopia, we can only take fuller ownership of it and its limitations. There is no perfection within human nature, only greater integrity, greater embrace of the nature of our true selves.
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Something that seems remarkable, almost impossible, but we know from our own experience can and does happen.