Unfortunately I couldn't tell if the author was being sarcastic or sincere. If sincere, then I think that the childhood definition of sin is here letting us down. We need to rethink, in our generation, what sin is. When we define sin we establish our anthropology, that is our relationship, our place in relation to God.

Josh Bowron

I feel like I'm reading in part a caricature of Christianity in this piece, and not because of a want to defend a doctrine of Original Sin--though I think such a doctrine, far from being oppressive, can be used to defend a limited, humble, accountable, and moderated sense of ourselves and society. Though as you say, Jim, that hardly needs defending in some form if we just happen to read the newspaper or turn on the morning news.

Christian theology is not organized just around the problem of sin, the condition of alienation from God, but around God's desire to commune with us, of which the breadth and depth of the Incarnation in fulness (which Frances Coady drawing on VII docs reminds is the full sweep of from birth, life, teaching, death, resurrection, ascension, and coextensive with the sending of the Holy Spirit) is ultimate expression. As Karl Rahner remind, as did St Symeon the New Theologian, God always desired to become human. This being so pre- and post- Fall. Pre- and post- alienation, which is not simply a past/future reality, but an existential, and ontological reality where our being is always so in communion. Are we in alienation or in Christ? Notice a crucial piece, that God makes available to us His Harmony "through means of Himself" to quote St Irenaeus. We cannot come out of that alienation ourselves, but only through that Means, Jesus Christ. And in Him, the work of ascesis, discipline, discipleship, of becoming a new creation takes hold.

And as William Temple would remind, the Incarnation bespeaks of sacramentality, God's revelation of Godself precisely through the created, through matter, through flesh--even unto birth, birth in a manger; even unto death, death on a cross.

Sacramentality and sin together bespeak of a different framework for us at the practical and practicable level: ascesis or discipline in Jesus Christ who in Himself offers and is and creates a community, the Church--I call this Christ's sociality.

From the desert elders, especially St Cassian, to Benedictine monasticism the goal of ascesis is the education of desire. To simply go with desire rather than bridle desire may seem liberating, but it shapes who we are in an understanding in which our being and doing are coterminous and representative of relationship/communion. What habits are we forming when we use another for our own pleasure without any sense of love or care for their person the next morning? We, certainly, can use our spouse, but we cannot escape the next morning our sin, our disordered desire, in that case. Note, what I don't say. Pleasure is not in itself a bad thing or sinful, indeed, is a part of being a creature. To say otherwise flirts with Manichaeism. Anglicans have tended rather to say pleasure needs to be channeled and moderated.

In this framework on the whole, its thinkers come to understand that the passions are fallen, not sin themselves. To say our desires are wounded is quite distinct from saying they are alienation. Again, the latter flirts with Manichaeism, suggests God cannot work through matter, when clearly our Lord enjoyed a good cup of wine, conversation, and much else of human life. But being fallen, ur-sins (the deadlies) are noted as dispositions or movements or habits or in MacIntyres' more modern terminology, practices. Wrath is not only a disposition but one reinforced by outbursts and willful expression. The medicine is also practices that educate our desires, our passions. That medicine often has general and particular qualities.

Abbb Isaiah of Scetis notes in his Ascetic Discourses that the passions--anger, lust, etc., have a holy purpose, but they have become disordered and we misdirect them. Anger, for example, is meant to serve equity and justice and can be an expression of love when we do not stand idle and allow another to be harmed. But, it is distinct to stand in for and speak a "no" in a firm peace and another to rant. If you have ever experienced that difference either in yourself or from another, it's quite different. Thus, the passions need redirected (first and foremost to God), educated, habituated, renewed.

Framed within the ground of Christ Jesus through the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, our marriage rite is actually a fine example of this sacramental-ascetical principle in rite and practice which says, "The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of chidlren and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord...."

Honestly, I just got more out of Christopher's comment than I've gotten out of a post on Episcopal Café in quite a while.

I feel like his is a much more convincing vision of sin for a post-post-modern society where faux neo-Stoic ideology of death to emotion and pleasure is what is preached in the pulpits of the majority of conservative evangelical churches (which still dominate the Christian ideological marketplace, whether we like it or not). I say that as a recovering child of that tradition who suffered years upon years of psycho-spiritual trauma, akin to Martin Luther's before he left Rome.

This view of sin, like Marcus Borg's or Peter Gomes's, is liberating enough not to fixate on guilt and develop a complex like Luther, but convincing enough to restrain the random hook-ups, excessive drinking, and general disregard for the reality of sin that I see on my university campus on Thursday through Saturday night. This vision could save my generation, or we will continue to secularize under the old vision.