Conflation

While perusing through my usual schedule of friends’ blogs, I came upon a post on Alex’s that got me reading an article by Hans Madueme. I usually don’t read articles as they tend to be much longer than the standard one or two paragraph blurbs on people’s blogs, but this one’s really good. Here’s an excerpt:

Sin’s deceptiveness is a red wine that intoxicates our minds. The world is charged, said Gerald Manley Hopkins, with the grandeur of God. Our very existence depends on divine grace. Yet as individuals, we are so often deceived; otherwise intelligent people become imbeciles as they argue against God’s existence (e.g. Richard Dawkins). They write prolifically, insisting that God does not exist. But then, shall the clay say to the potter, “You did not make me”? Shall Calvin and Hobbes debate Bill Watterson’s existence? Even Christians who take sin seriously can still be duped by it. We are tempted to domesticate sin by conflating our finitude or humanness with our sinfulness. Oh well, Susan did commit that sin, but she is only human after all! Let us recognize our sinfulness, but it hardly follows that we justify it glibly with: “We are only human.”

This bit really struck a chord with me. I know that my brothers and sisters and I myself have often admitted to sinning in an “Oh well, what else can y’do/expect?” tone and until now, I’ve never thought about it much, even if it did seem a little like defeatist talk. But when brought up and shown for what it is, this attitude is truly destructive.

Not only are Christians (myself included) settling for less by talking (and more importantly, thinking) like this, we’re actually rationalizing or justifying our sinful misconduct in a round-about way. “It’s reasonable… acceptable, even, to sin, because we are human. It can’t be helped!” This kind of thinking screams to be adopted but at its pleasant-sounding core, it is going to get us killed, in a spiritual sense.

You see, taking this lie to its rightful conclusion, if to sin was to be human–”To err is to be human.”–then Christ’s work would ultimately be unnecessary since a fair and just God couldn’t possibly blame you for being and doing what He made you. That’s how I look at it, anyway. Reasonably, God would not need to save us from sin if sinfulness = humanness since there would be nothing to save us from. God gave us humanness as a gift, and cannot thus condemn His own work. This is why it is important for us to realize our depravity and limitedness without letting the two mixing to become one and the same thing (i.e. don’t be tricked into thinking that just because you are human, sinfulness is a natural or acceptable result, the two are distinct, but related, realities). It’s easy to blame humanness for sin, but hard to blame the human for it, if you get what I mean.