by How does our conception of sin matter to our understanding of faith? What changes about our relationship with God and neighbor if we conceive of sin as a debt rather than a weight? And do these conceptions have an impact on the temporal order — e.g., do our changing conceptions of sin shape our conceptions of justice or retribution? Notre Dame professor Gary Anderson tackles the first two questions, but I’m guessing he leaves the second question open for LR & E bloggers to explore. Anderson has written a fascinating new book, The Evolution of Sin, in which he traces the changing metaphors used to capture the essence of sin in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Christianity Today:
In the Old Testament, the metaphor that gets 80 or 90 percent of the textual space pictures sin as a weight or burden that has to be carried. But this recurring motif isn’t reflected in English translations of the Bible. That is one metaphor in the Hebrew that is not systematically rendered literally in English. So in many, many texts in the Old Testament, where forgiveness is conceived of as taking away a burden, the conventional English translation is just “forgive a sin.”
When we move to the Second Temple period (the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament and so forth), that image of sin as a weight disappears almost completely. I have to be careful here. It doesn’t disappear altogether, because we have those canonical texts from the Old Testament that remain on the table. But the complete absence of this metaphor is particularly striking in the teaching and parables of Jesus. He never talks about sinful individuals bearing enormous weights on their shoulders, as you might have expected from the Old Testament. Instead, he talks about debtors and creditors and building up treasures in heaven.
The significance of the shift lies primarily in the nature of the correlative remedy:
One finding that emerged from my work on the book—and it actually came as a considerable surprise—is that once the Second Temple period Jewish writers and Christian writers began to think of sin as a debt, this led immediately to the correlative idea that meritorious actions, virtuous actions, create a credit. . . . In the Old Testament, one of the deficits of the weight metaphor is that it doesn’t create its correlative, a virtuous individual who is, let’s say, like Atlas, who can hold the world or hold the sins of others. We don’t have that notion at all.
Here’s a piece from FT’s historical archive dealing with the same considerations, and referencing Anderson – http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/12/treasures-in-heaven
I do wonder if there was a change from the idea of crime as a debt to be repaid, resulting in incarceration or penalty (retribution), to the idea of crime as a social disease, as a result of material condition, or due to ignorance, leading to attempts to “fix” those problems (rehabilitation). We have now returned, as noted by Darley and others, to a more retributive system. I wonder if this return is due to simple dissatisfaction with the rehabilitative aspects, which did not seem to be “working,” and thus a return to “default,” or with yet another change in the idea of sin / crime itself. I wonder if there is some idea of hopelessness apparent in the most recent shifts, and if it is related to the idea that crime is some sort of addiction – see here: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/addiction-and-freedom.
Thanks Jonathan. And I wonder if sin/crime as a debt to be repaid gets even trickier in a context like habitual sex offenders. We have no idea what to do with them — we’re moving more toward preemptively locking them up or chemically castrating them even though it doesn’t fit with our notions of justice. If sin/crime is a weight to be carried with us, perhaps we’d be less focused on reaching closure in the form of achieving rehabilitation or debt cancellation?
The concept of sin as debt is interesting. We do see a lot of language talking about the burden of sin, yet what is debt if not a burden?
This post reminded me of a song we sang a lot in my youth group at church. The lyrics of “He Paid A Debt” say pretty clearly that Christ paid a debt that we could never pay. While the language of sin as debt makes sense, it is not to the exclusion of the idea of sin as a burden.
Whichever way we look at it, the bottom line has to be that Christ took it upon Himself, whether it is called debt or a burden. If Christ didn’t take it upon himself, the way we describe sin doesn’t really matter. We would still be suffering from it. Thank God that he did take it on Himself.
Sin certainly has the characteristics of addiction particularly as it relates to the voluntary abdication of freedom in exchange for slavery.
Perhaps criminal justice is properly the process by which society protects itself from those repercussions (the debt of injustice) with a hope to return to a state of justice. This would be more the art of restoration than retribution which would seem to be another symptom of a similar loss of freedom to the impulse of revenge.
I have always considered that one of the great strengths of our nation’s foundation of freedom is that it recognizes a truth. That truth is that a freeman is free by nature and cannot be controlled (even by imprisonment and torture). Rather than fight the freeman, the idea would be to align communal interests with the interests of freemen.
Criminals are therefore the ones who have abdicated their freedom sufficiently to jeopardize communal efforts at justice. We should then incarcerate them, or compel them to treatments, or paying restitutions in proportion not to the magnitude of their offense but to the degeneration of their freewill into the slavery they have surrendered to.
Forgive me if this is a bit rambling. There is something of a brainstorm involved in this contribution to the discussion.
“And I wonder if sin/crime as a debt to be repaid gets even trickier in a context like habitual sex offenders. We have no idea what to do with them — we’re moving more toward preemptively locking them up or chemically castrating them even though it doesn’t fit with our notions of justice. If sin/crime is a weight to be carried with us, perhaps we’d be less focused on reaching closure in the form of achieving rehabilitation or debt cancellation?”
With those ideas, I hear echoes of Minority Report. Sex offenders are going to be the test case for the patience of the criminal justice system. There, the lines become blurry between very harsh sentences for one offense, and preemptive punishment for later (presumed) “offenses.” If something is so horrible to the public mind (as I think sex offenders are), I think it would be better for our society to impose a more harsh punishment for an initial grave offense rather than to preemptively punish for presumed “offenses.” Chemical castration (or actual, in the case of the Louisiana law) seems to fit under the category of “presumed” offenses. (It is curious in the case of some sexual offenders that, if one were to move a year in the law – say, 19 for the age of consent for any nudity in print rather than 18, entities like Playboy would suddenly become massive havens of sex offenders, and their subscribers, possessors and distributors of child pornography.)
“We should then incarcerate them, or compel them to treatments, or paying restitutions in proportion not to the magnitude of their offense but to the degeneration of their freewill into the slavery they have surrendered to.”
The problem I see, David, is measuring not only the magnitude of punishment, but the question as to when their free will had been “repaired,” so to speak. I enjoy C.S. Lewis’s little essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (found here – http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian.html). I like especially this idea:
The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question ‘Is it deserved?’ is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a ‘just deterrent’ or a ‘just cure’. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.
I also note that your idea could have a curious result. In the idea of chains of free will, one could just as easily be a slave to mild vandalism as to sex offending. In your notion, could a one-time sex offender receive a much more mild sentence that someone who door-dinged 15 cars?
I’m not sure I grasp Lewis’ point, the goal of my reconsideration of criminal justice is to learn what can and can’t be practically applied.
I have no preconceived notions as to whether sex offenders are more addicted than graffiti artists or murderers. Some of these people may be free in a way that isn’t compatible with my theory (socio/psycho-paths are a special case where what I mean by “free” is important.. are there places in modern society for even these? probably not).
Some have pointed to graffiti artists as an important link in the decline of urban zones. Others argue that some of these young folks are essential members (if disaffected ones) of the community. Graffiti may not be as much a property crime as a problem of disambiguation of communities that make up the urban landscape (absent property owners verses disaffected locals).
Even as extreme a viewpoint change as I have suggested will still be effected by public opinion. And I cannot guarantee more utility from my approach because utilitarian models are subject to statistical manipulation.
I’m trying to get the public (and therefore the state) out of the revenge business and into the justice business. And while we’re talking mostly about the criminal in this case, there is much more to talk about on the “victim” side of this equation. I suppose I should be prepared to talk about society providing justice to victims via some other means than torturing their antagonist.
Back to the subject… surely recidivism rates are more important than public disgust and it may be reasonable to hold someone “unjustly” for an extended period of time because we have learned that even comparatively minor crimes might need disproportionate sentences (disproportionate from the prevailing theories today). It’s clear that sexual predators are such cases.
But there are different kinds of murder, assault etc. And the condition of the perpetrator is germane to the considerations of sentencing (this is why manslaughter isn’t murder) even in our current system.
I’m merely trying to shift the center (not the whole) of the system to that consideration.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting we “coddle” criminals nor “love them back to mental health” or any such thing. I spank my children when they misbehave (and I know plenty of parents who don’t spank their children that are still quite capable of being firm). This isn’t about being “nice”. It’s about promoting virtue in the whole of the populace.
The effect of surgery on the ability to reach an erection is connected to a man’s age and whether nerve-sparing surgery was done.