Author Danielle Shroyer shares how the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek frequently define sin as “missing the mark”:
Though original sin has told us a story of being stuck in our sin, when we turn to scripture, we actually find a very different story. Though modern science has just come to realize how amazingly malleable people are, the wisdom of scripture has told us this all along.…
The most predominant word for sin in both the Hebrew [hatta] and the Greek [hamartia] assumes in its very definition our ability to hit the mark. We can’t miss the mark unless we assume the mark is where we’re aiming, right? In 768 instances of the word “sin” in the Bible, we are described as people who are standing with a bow and arrow, aiming at a target that we miss. That’s not a sin nature, and it’s definitely not total depravity. That’s novice, or perhaps distractedness, or bad aim. It could be any number of things. But the idea that we are not designed to hit the target set before us would be completely antithetical to the way sin is put forth in the vast majority of scripture.
When scripture calls us to goodness, to repentance, to grace, it’s not like telling a fish to ride a bicycle. It’s not something so contradictory to who we are and what we can do that it’s an impossible notion. Salvation is available to us because God has offered it, but also because God has designed us to be capable of responding to it. We can take aim at the target simply because God chose to make us that way. Yes, we miss the mark … but that doesn’t mean we are without any ability to play the game.
In Scripture, sin is often described as an error or mistake, not a condition of our being:
The Bible talks about sin as something that ought to be called out, but not something that ought to be condemning to the point of shame…. Sin is an action, a choice, or if we’ve made a number of them in a row, a path or a habit. There is nothing irreversible or determinate about it. Sin is not a state of being. It is a way of being in the world that is always and every moment in flux, based on our choices. It’s a growth mindset, not a fixed one.
To put this another way, there is a difference between having fallen and being fallen. Sin (hamartia, hatta) means that we have fallen. It doesn’t mean we are fallen. We may be in flux depending on our last action and our next intention, but we aren’t simply tossed around on the waves of our own competence. We reside in the boat of blessed grace, which holds us steady even as we falter and sway from day to day. We may have fallen, but we can get up.
Returning to the Center Inspired by the writings of Henri Nouwen
The spiritual life is not a straight line toward perfection. It is a continual process of wandering andreturning.
We often think of sin as something that separates us permanently from God, but the deeper truth is that sin is usually forgetting who we are.We lose sight of our identity as God’s beloved and drift into fear, distraction, and self-reliance.
But the good news of the Gospel is that every moment holds the possibility of return.
When we recognize that we have wandered—through impatience, anger, indifference, or pride—we are already standing at the doorway of grace. The awareness itself is an invitation. God is not waiting to condemn but to welcome us home again.
The spiritual journey, then, is not about never missing the mark. It is about learning how to return—again and again—to the One who never stops calling us beloved.
Each small act of turning back—through prayer, repentance, kindness, or humility—re-aims our lives toward love.
Father Greg Boyle considers how many of the evils we witness today reflect the consequences of our painful disconnection from the God of love:
In the face of senseless gun violence, political treachery and revenge, hate crimes, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks, some people will just say, “Sin and evil are on display.” When we do this, we’ve given up. We’re not even trying. We declare that we will no longer be seeking solutions, because we believe that human beings are somehow stained from the start. Original sin doesn’t explain the terrible. Lots of things do. Original sin is not one of them. There is no sin gene in us. We’re born from love and always invited to love….
I asked a friend to talk to her daughter who had just graduated from a Jesuit [Catholic] university about how she and her peers saw sin. Her daughter said, “We don’t really use the word ‘sin’ or talk about it. Sin is an Old World map.” Now, I suppose some might lament that sin is not on the front burner. It’s actually not even on the back burner. It is nowhere near the stove. And, of course, if you tried to use an Old World map today to get you to, say, Iraq, it would drop you off at Mesopotamia.
We could lament that young folks might see sin this way. Or we could find the invitation in it. Is the love of God looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation, or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing? Scripture has it as “Then your light shall break like the dawn and your wound shall quickly be healed. The light shall rise for you in your gloom. The darkness shall become for you like midday” [Isaiah 58:10]. I endlessly tell gang members that the God of love doesn’t see sin. Our God sees son (and daughter). “I believe that sin has no substance,” Julian of Norwich writes, “not a particle of being.” Then she says, “With all due respect to Mother Church … but this does not line up.” She couldn’t get sin to align with her God of love.
Boyle suggests a shift in emphasis when it comes to behavior:
The moral quest has never kept us moral; it’s just kept us from each other. So maybe we should abandon the moral quest, since it’s an Old World map, and embrace instead the journey to wholeness, flourishing love, and defiant joy. We don’t want to end up in Mesopotamia. Yes, we want to do the next right thing, but what is the next right thing and who is able to choose it? Only the healthy person can. So we help each other, not to make better choices but to walk home to well-being and deeper growth in love.
Definition: Theodicy is the branch of theology that seeks to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the belief in a benevolent, omnipotent God. Theodicies aiming to provide a rational explain of why a good God permits the presence of tragedy and injustice.
Recommended Reading:
Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Knopf, 2023). Matt Lynch, Flood and Fury:Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God (IVP, 2023). Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy(Princeton University Press, 2015)
Theodicies
I am not fan of theodicies. Following Martin Luther and Simone Weil, I believe that every effort to rationalize affliction inevitably calls evil good or good evil, precisely because the premises are flawed. I regard Luther and Weil’s Theology of the Cross as an anti-theodicy that sees goodness and affliction intersect in the Passion of the Christ without trying to harmonize real contradictions.
That said, theodicies are ancient. They express humanity’s authentic lament and our wrestle with the Why? of the absurd inside our fragile belief systems. When I regard that deeply human effort through that lens, I have a lot of patience for what’s going on. As I discovered recently, alongside the particular calamities that trigger our theodicies, we can also identify ongoing social crises that a culture has begun to recognize and weaves with the activity or inactivity of the Divine in the narratives we compose.
Flood Stories as Theodicies
Ancient flood myths are a form of theodicy. The collective memory of a world-ending or catastrophic floods are ubiquitous to human cultures across the world. While they very dramatically, they also share themes including creation, judgment, survival, and renewal. A brief web search turned up far more than I expected:
Mesopotamian Flood Myths:
Epic of Gilgamesh: Utnapishtim survives a divine flood by building a boat, similar to Noah’s Ark.
Atra-Hasis: Another Mesopotamian tale where a flood is sent to curb human overpopulation.
Jewish Flood Narratives:
Noah’s Ark: A global flood sent by God, with Noah saving his family and animals in an ark.
Enoch: Noah’s flood sent to drown the Nephilim, who are destroying the world.
Greek Mythology:
Deucalion and Pyrrha: Zeus floods the earth, and Deucalion and Pyrrha survive by building a chest.
Hindu Mythology:
Manu and the Fish: A fish warns Manu of a great flood, and he builds a boat to save himself and the seeds of life.
Chinese Mythology:
Great Flood of Gun-Yu: A flood controlled by Yu the Great, who becomes a cultural hero.
Native American Flood Myths:
Ojibwe: The Great Flood and the creation of Turtle Island.
Choctaw: A flood story involving survival on a raft.
Mesoamerican Myths:
Maya Popol Vuh: A flood sent to destroy the wooden people, an early creation of the gods.
Inca Mythology:
Unu Pachakuti: A flood sent by the god Viracocha to destroy giants.
Norse Mythology:
Bergelmir: A flood caused by the blood of Ymir, the primordial giant.
African Myths:
Mandingo: A flood story involving divine retribution and survival.
Pacific Islander Myths:
Hawaiian Flood Myth: Nu’u survives a flood in a canoe, guided by the god Kane.
Australian Aboriginal Myths:
Floods caused by ancestral spirits as acts of creation or punishment.
Zoroastrian Mythology:
Yima’s Vara: A divine flood avoided by building an underground refuge.
I’m particularly interested in reading how some of these stories may function as theodicies and what crises they address. While some flood stories focused on how the gods/God created conditions for human habitation (Ojibwe) or disposed of monsters that threatened human life (Enoch, Unu Pachakuti), I’m pondering those that may begin with the memory of a catastrophe that begged the question of why it happened. The story may then function as an archetype and/or warning for the reader.
An additional note: prior to the Enlightenment (including in the Bible), theodicies did not distinguish between natural disasters and human wickedness since both alike were considered sovereignly ordained acts. Whether it was a plague, a famine, an earthquake, or an invading army, God is typically pictured as the active agent (though Jesus handily refutes that inference in the first paragraph of Luke 13).
Gilgamesh via Bohannon
The earliest Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh may be dated as early as 2100 BCE, prior to the composition of Genesis. In that account, Enlil (the chief god) leads the decision to flood the earth. Why? Because the gods (most of them) are irritated by the growing clamor and chaos caused by humanity. The rising din is disruptive—by eliminating humankind in a great flood, peace will be restored. Humanity is saved when Ea (or Enki), god of wisdom, secretly warns Utnapishtim and instructs him to build a boat. Utnapishtim survives the flood, so the human race is preserved.
Previously, I had not given any thought to the meaning of the gods’ aggravation or why our noise assaulted to their ears. But I’ve been captivated by Cat Bohannon’s must-read book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
Bohannon posits that flood myths such as Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh were composed to address a human crisis: the problem of explosive population growth in the cities. The gods were annoyed because the people were ‘noisy’ … but why noisy? Because of the rapid expansion of big cities, due in great part, she believes, to practices such as urban wet nursing (and her argument is biologically solid).
Thus, the social foundations for those flood myths (meaning, how they tried to explain the ‘why?’ of a big flood theologically) was a response to overpopulation. In hindsight, they believed that when the big floods came, the gods’ agenda was to depopulate. In other words, an actual sociological crisis was projected into a divine response to address the problem with a flood. It’s an early form of theodicy. OR was the flood a metaphor for the people themselves… a human deluge overflowing the banks of the city!
In either case, the story can function as a theodicy (justifying the gods) at two levels: (1)
The gods are not simply capricious. Their judgments may be destructive, but their acts aren’t simply arbitrary. When bad things happen, if the gods are involved, they are addressing an actual problem (not necessarily sin) relative to human activity. And (2) at least one of the gods was even sympathetic and humane. In polytheistic religions, the various gods represent aspects or attributes of the Most High God or council of gods.
Genesis via Lynch
By way of both comparison and contrast, following Matt Lynch’s, Flood and Fury:Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God (2023) describes how the Genesis flood story also addresses a sociological crisis—though a different one: the problem of human violence. As Lynch reads, Genesis 6, he hears echoes of Genesis 1, where we read that “God saw that [what he created] was good”—and specifically, good for people to inhabit.
But in Genesis 6:11, we read, “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence.” Lynch reads a similar Hebrew construct here, but in reverse. “God saw that the earth was RUINED.” That is, the earth was ruined for human habitation—rendered uninhabitable by human violence such that human extinction would be inevitable. “God saw how corrupt [destined to perish] the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways” (6:12), leading to a ruined creation that would ultimately be uninhabitable and bring about our extinction.
So, in meaning-making a big flood in their oral history or cultural memory, the Jews set their story over against Gilgamesh, by reading Yahweh’s flood not as mitigating overpopulation through human extinction, but rather, restoring an inhabitable world to preserve humankind from extinction. It is a re-Creation story, a reset, a fresh start.
Theodicies as Social Commentary
What the stories have in common is a flood, an act of divine compassion, and a hero who saves the race by building an ark. And to my point, both are theodicies that seek to somehow rationalize a divinely sanctioned apocalyptic flood. But my question is how the stories also function as social commentaries. Gilgamesh deals with cities flooded with or because of extreme overcrowding; Genesis is critiquing with human violence toward one another and its environmental impact.
In the Genesis account, one message is that unlike the Gilgamesh gods, despite the destructive power of the flood, God’s heart is to restore. That’s the theological message. But the story also sends an ongoing ethical message: human violence is so self-destructive that unchecked, it will lead to our extinction. God has provided a way of escape, of salvation—an ark into which all are still being welcomed.
Noah’s ark thus becomes a spiritual archetypes for both Jews and Christians, and a metaphor for readers today. It’s not that God is the agent of divine genocide, nor that God ‘sends’ climate-related disasters as punishment upon humanity. But then what? Historically, a Christian reading was that when the flood comes (e.g., politically, socially, ideologically, etc.), there is an invitation via repentance (admitting we can’t save ourselves) to enter ‘the ark of salvation’ (don’t read that narrowly) to endure whatever comes together as a human family (a every human and every creature with us) that knows God is ultimately the life-giver and not the death-dealer.
Author Barbara Brown Taylor describes the suffering we experience when we live from a sense of disconnection:
Deep down in human existence, there is an experience of being cut off from life. There is some memory of having been treated cruelly, and—a little deeper, perhaps—the memory of having treated someone else cruelly as well…. Deep down in human existence there is an experience of reaching for forbidden fruit, of pushing away loving arms, of breaking something on purpose just to prove that you can. Deep down in human existence there is an experience of doing whatever is necessary to feed and comfort the self, because there is no one else to trust, no other purpose to serve, no other god to follow.
For ages and ages, this experience has been called sin—deadly alienation from the source of all life. By some definitions, it implies willful turning away from God. By others, it is an unavoidable feature of being human. Either way, it is a name for the experience of being cut off from air, light, sustenance, community, hope, meaning, life. It is less concerned with specific behaviors than with the aftermath of those behaviors. There are a thousand ways to turn away from the light, after all, with variations according to culture, century, class, and gender. The point is to know the difference between light and darkness, and to recognize the pull when it comes.
Though we may make choices out of a sense of disconnection, we can also choose to return to the original blessing of God’s love:
Repentance begins with the decision to return to relationship: to accept our God-given place in community, and to choose a way of life that increases life for all members of that community. Needless to say, this often involves painful changes, which is why most of us prefer remorse to repentance. We would rather say, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I feel really, really awful about what I have done” than actually start doing things differently.…
“All sins are attempts to fill voids,” wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil. Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but it refuses to be filled. It rejects all substitutes…. It is the holy of holies inside of us, which only God may fill….
I do not believe that sin is the enemy we often make it out to be, at least not when we recognize it and name it as such. When we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back. Sin is our only hope, the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility of true repentance.
“Is it sin or is it survival?” a student of mine asked not long ago. It’s a question I’ve heard repeatedly as I’ve taught called The Christian Interior Life at WTSover the years.
“All this talk of coping sounds as if we need to have empathy for abusers,” a reader asked, after a recent article.
Indeed, after When Narcissism Comes to Church was released, I heard some critiques that I didn’t use the particular word sin enough. The common hesitation—when we begin to use psychological words, it seems as if we’re veering away from theological ones, and when we veer away from robust words like sin, we’re prone to minimize it.
What’s lost in this, however, is that much of what I and others have written on narcissism, abuse, and trauma describe contexts where strong doctrines of sin were present. And yet, in these very places, there is too often 1) a real minimization of actual sin—hurt, harm, and abuse and 2) a denial of systemic sin, most often impacting women, the socially/racially/economically marginalized, and more, often hidden behind proclamations of a Gospel of grace and freedom.
As I’ve often said about my own writing—sin isn’t a word count. You reveal your actual doctrine of sin through the ways in which you courageously engage not just one-off misdeeds but actual and embedded patterns of harm. And psychology serves us by deepening our understanding of how our patterns develop, how our character forms, even about how the power of sin—in people, in family systems, in communities—can be undone, not through what I’ve called “bandaid theology” (quick fixes) but through the deep work of disentangling a heart from whatever binds it.
Sin and Styles of Coping
“When you talk about the nervous system,” someone says, “it sounds as if you’re just saying we learn to cope and adapt, not that we might actually be engaging sinfully.”
Those of us who are engaged in asking how God-designed physiological and neurobiological processes are involved in human action are profoundly interested in what’s bubbling beneath the surface of our behaviors. And we’ve tapped the well of psychology to affirm and deepen what wise theologians have long taught about what’s happening within.
Like the desert fathers and mothers of the third and fourth centuries, as former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams notes, cartographers of the soul who were not just interested in bad behaviors but in the internal dynamics motivating sin—what they called the “passions.” Williams says that they named a “whole realm of instinct, reaction, coping mechanisms” that drive our outward behaviors, and a “compound of anxiety, defensiveness and acquisitiveness,” all driving us into inner and outer turmoil, robbing us of what God designed us for—connection and communion.
That’s nervous system language. And that’s theological language!
In other words, they sensed that the story of our patterns and habits is inextricably tied to a churning anxiety within—evidence of the kind of self-protection and survival we experience east of Eden, not the safety and security of Eden.
But here’s a physiological fact: the nervous system does not operate according to a moral code. It does not pause to ask, Is this right or wrong? It asks something much more immediate: Am I safe? And it reflexively responds by adapting and coping in a way that facilitates safety, at all costs.
That’s important.
Here, we lean in with wonder, asking what might actually be going on beneath the surface. Here, our hearts are widened beyond moral judgment and into compassion.
Our hearts grow in compassion for the child raised by a volatile parent who eventually learned to scan every room for subtle shifts in mood. Or the girl who became fiercely self-reliant because no one else was reliable. Or the boy who endured violence only to develop a powerful fight response that now keeps him from being crushed.
All bodies habituated to terror, adapting to survive.
And from the vantage point of survival, these responses make perfect sense. They worked. They helped us endure what might otherwise have been unbearable.
But hear this: survival strategies do not automatically become healthy ways of living. Survival strategies are not merely nervous systems in search of safety—they also become morally consequential.
The fight response that once protected a child may show up decades later as anger or intimidation toward a spouse or colleague. A flight response may turn into anxious perfectionism that keeps an entire household walking on eggshells—everyone bracing for the next sigh of disappointment or the quiet pressure of impossible standards. A fawn response may lead someone to chronically abandon their own voice while quietly resenting the people they work so hard to please. A freeze response may become emotional withdrawal that leaves loved ones feeling shut out.
What once helped us survive can eventually wound us—and the people around us.
Trauma therapist Diane Langberg has spent decades sitting with the aftermath of human harm, and she puts it starkly: “Abuse does terrible damage to the soul. It distorts how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we see God.” When the soul is distorted in this way, our strategies for survival begin to shape the way we move through the world.
And the cycle can continue. As Langberg observes elsewhere, “The misuse of power devastates people, and those who have been devastated by power are often tempted to wield it in the same destructive ways.”
In other words, wounded people sometimes wound others—not because they intend to, but because survival patterns become ways of living.
“How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” wrote Bell Hooks.
This is where the conversation between psychology and theology becomes especially important.
Psychology has helped us see the wisdom of our coping. But theology reminds us that human life is not merely about survival.
It is about love.
Our Stories, Our Sins
Rowan Williams writes that “sin is what happens when we refuse the reality of God’s love and try to construct a life for ourselves on other foundations.”
Seen this way, sin is not merely rule-breaking. It is a life lived in disconnection, east of Eden, and organized around substitutes for love.
And this is where trauma and sin intersect in a deeply human way.
Consider life in these 1,185 chapters between Genesis 3 and Revelation 20. Born into a broken world and wounded by imperfect human beings, we begin constructing lives around strategies that promise safety—control, perfection, power, withdrawal, approval. But the strategies that once protected us can, over time, become the very foundations on which we build our lives.
What began as adaptation slowly becomes orientation.
Centuries before trauma theory, Augustine described this dynamic as disordered love—loving something in the wrong way or giving ultimate weight to things that cannot sustain us.
Modern neuroscience might describe the same process as the nervous system organizing around survival rather than connection.
Different language. Same human story.
For me, what brings it all together is this: trauma is a story about disconnection—disconnection from ourselves, from others, and from God.
And sin is life lived in the tragic reality of disconnection—the trauma of everyday life in these 1,185 chapters filled with heartache as we eagerly await One who will wipe away every tear.
The reality of life lived in disconnection is seen, too often, among those of us who purport to use the right words and do the right things for God.
It’s the pastor who talks of grace and kingdom and sin, but isn’t aware of his own lifelong fight response. His own disordered love hurts and harms those he pastors, a confusing dynamic for the ones harmed because he is supposed to be their shepherd, their pastor. Empathy stretches to his early story of pain and the little boy who still resides fearfully within him, while accountability requires that he face his sin—and its relational devastation.
It’s the activist who burns with a righteous passion for justice, who can name the sins of systems with clarity and courage, but who has never slowed long enough to tend to the unhealed wounds that fuel the fire. The cause becomes the place where pain finds expression, and opponents become enemies rather than neighbors. The fight for justice is good and necessary, but when fight is the only gear available, relationships fracture and the very community the work requires begins to thin and fray.
It’s the professor who speaks eloquently about love, formation, and the life of the mind, whose lectures on virtue and humility draw nods from attentive students, but whose interior life is quietly governed by flight—anxious productivity, relentless achievement, the pressure to always prove her worth. Students feel the subtle tension in the room, the sense that nothing less than excellence will do. The very wisdom she teaches about rest, grace, and belonging struggles to find a home within her.
So, while it’s tempting to get entangled in abstract debates about sin and styles of coping, the real work for each of us is to look courageously at ourselves, at the both/and that includes our stories and our self-centered patterns. In the end, psychology—as I see it—doesn’t minimize or evade sin, it deepens and widens the scope. It asks how we’re coping this side of Eden.
And, as I’ve written in Healing What’s Within, the remedy—psychologically and theologically—is introduced right there in Genesis 3, smack dab in a moment of fear and fig leaves, an invitation to reconnection amidst the disconnection, as God’s kind hand extends to us and his words soften our self-protected hearts: “Where are you?”
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Individual Contemplation Prompt
Both readings describe a spectrum — from the wounds we’ve carried, to the coping patterns that formed around them, to the moments we’ve turned away from the light or hurt someone else. Where do you find yourself on that spectrum today? Is there a place in your own story where survival became orientation — where a strategy that once protected you is now distancing you from love?
Group Discussion Prompt
DeGroat writes that “what began as adaptation slowly becomes orientation” — our survival patterns quietly becoming the foundations we build our lives on. Where have you seen this dynamic at work — in your own life, in communities you’ve been part of, or in the people DeGroat describes (the pastor, the activist, the professor)? And where have you experienced — even glimpsed — what it feels like when God’s “Where are you?” reaches through the hiding?
Father Richard Rohr explores a broad definition of the word “sin”:
The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It’s almost the only task of religion—to communicate not worthiness, but union; to reconnect us to our original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls that state of separateness “sin,” and its total undoing is stated frequently as God’s clear job description: “My dear people, we are already the children of God; it is only what is in the future that has not yet been revealed, and then all we know is that we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).
The word sin has so many unhelpful connotations in most of our minds that it’s very problematic today. For most of us, it does not connote a state of alienation or separateness. Instead, it connotes naughty behavior and personal moral unworthiness. But these are merely symptoms and not the state itself! Disconnected people will do stupid and harmful things. Instead, the core and foundational meaning of sin is any life lived autonomous and outside “the garden of Eden.” We cannot ever become perfect or “worthy,” but we can become reconnected to our Source.
Sin primarily describes a state of fragmentation—when the part thinks it’s separate from the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who we are in God. That “who” is nothing we can earn or obtain. It’s nothing we can accomplish or work up to. Why? Because we already have it.
The biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. It’s about realization and not performance principles. We cannot get there; we can only be there,but that foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe and too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us.
The ego, however, makes it all about achievement and attainment. At that point, religion becomes a worthiness contest in which everybody loses—which they realize, if they’re honest. Many people give up on the whole spiritual journey when they see that they can’t live up to the performance principle. They don’t want to live as hypocrites.
Yet union with God is really about awareness and realignment, a Copernican revolution of the mind and heart that is sometimes called conversion. (Copernicus, of course, was the first to claim that the world revolves around the sun, not vice versa—a truly shocking revelation in the 16th century!) Following conversion, that deep and wondrous inner knowing, a whole new set of behaviors and lifestyle will surely emerge. It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God; rather, I must first come to experience God’s love and then I will—almost naturally—be moral.
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What About Original Sin?
Monday, March 9, 2026
Father Richard shares his understanding of original sin:
The “image of God” in us is absolute and unchanging. It’s pure and total gift, given equally to all. But this picture was complicated when the concept of original sinentered the Christian mind.
In this idea—first put forth by Augustine in the fifth century but never mentioned in the Bible—we emphasized that human beings were born into “sin” because Adam and Eve “offended God” by eating from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” As punishment, God cast them out of the garden of Eden. Original sin wasn’t something we did at all; it was something that was done to us (passed down from Adam and Eve). In this understanding, we’re all off to a bad start.
By contrast, most of the world’s great religions start with some sense of primal goodness in their creation stories. The Jewish and Christian traditions beautifully succeeded at this, with the Genesis record telling us that God called creation “good” five times in Genesis 1:10–25, and even “very good” in 1:31.
But after Augustine, most Christian theologies shifted from the positive vision of Genesis 1 to the more negative vision of Genesis 3—the so-called fall, or what I am calling the “problem.” Instead of embracing God’s master plan for humanity and creation—what we Franciscans still call the “Primacy of Christ”—Christians shrunk our image of both Jesus and Christ. Our “Savior” became a mere Johnny-come-lately “answer” to the problem of sin, a problem that we had largely created ourselves.
In one way, the doctrine of “original sin” was good and helpful in that it taught us not to be surprised at the frailty and woundedness that we all carry.Just as goodness is inherent and shared, so it seems with evil. This is, in fact, a very merciful teaching. Knowledge of our shared wound ought to free us from the burden of unnecessary and individual guilt or shame and help us to be forgiving and compassionate with ourselves and one another.
Yet historically speaking, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with mistrust instead of trust.We have spent centuries trying to solve the “problem” that we’re told is at the heart of our humanity. But if we start with a problem, we tend to never get beyond that mindset.
To begin climbing out of the hole of original sin, we must start with a positive and generous cosmic vision. Generosity tends to build on itself. I have never met a truly compassionate or loving human being who did not have a foundational and even deep trust in the inherent goodness of human nature.
The Christian story line must start with a positive and overarching vision for humanity and for history, or it will never get beyond the primitive, exclusionary, and fear-based stages of most early human development. We are ready for a major course correction.
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✍️ Questions
For individual reflection (before the gathering): Think of a time in your spiritual life when you felt like you were working hard to close a gap — to become worthy, to get back to God, to fix what felt broken in you. What were you actually believing about yourself in that season? And when — if ever — did that change?
For group discussion: Rohr says the church has spent centuries “trying to solve the problem that we’re told is at the heart of our humanity” — and that starting with a problem almost guarantees we never get beyond it. Where do you most naturally start — with what’s wrong in you, or with what’s already true about you? And what might it take to actually believe the “yes” before the “no”?
Love [people] even in [their] sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Father Richard honors that we must be very clear about right and wrong, naming when injustice takes place, while maintaining our commitment to grace and love:
The full and final biblical message is restorative justice, but most of history has only been able to understand retributive justice. I know you’re probably thinking of many passages in the Old Testament that sure sound like serious retribution. And I can’t deny there are numerous black and white, vengeful scriptures, which is precisely why we must recognize that all scriptures are not equally inspired or from the same level of consciousness. Literal interpretation of Scripture is the Achilles’ heel of fundamentalist Christians.
We have to begin with dualistic thinking, just as we must first develop a healthy ego and frame before we can move beyond it. Jesus often made strong binary statements, for example, “You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24); “The Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:32–33). Wemust first be capable of some basic distinctions between good and evil before we can hold paradox. Without basic honesty and clarity, nondual thinking becomes very naive. We must first succeed at good dualistic thinking before we also discover its final inadequacy in terms of wisdom and compassion. Not surprisingly, Jesus exemplifies and teaches both dualistic clarity and then non-dual wisdom and compassion: “My Father’s sun shines on both the good and the bad; his rain falls on both the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).
The ego prefers a dualistic worldview where bad people are eternally punished, and good people (like ourselves) are totally rewarded. But the soul does not need to see others punished to be happy! Why would anyone like the notion of somebody being tortured for all eternity? What kind of psyche or soul can condemn others to hellfire? Certainly not Divine Love. [1]
Could God’s love really be that great and universal? Could it be anything less? Love is the lesson, and God’s love is so great that God will finally teach it to all of us. Who would be able to resist it once they see it? We’ll finally surrender, and God—Love—will finally win. God never loses. That is what it means to be God. That will be God’s “justice,” which will swallow up our lesser versions of retributive justice. [2]
One of the mistakes kind-hearted people make is to conflate the Written Word of God with the Incarnate Word of God.
They are, in fact, two different things.
John 5:39-40tells us that you can be so close to the Written Word of God that you fail to realize it points beyond itself to the Incarnate Word of God as the final authority.
So here, with Hildegard, she is not talking about the Written Word of God being present in everything. Rather, she is talking about the Incarnate Word of God, the Divine Logos, Jesus the Christ, as somehow being deeply present within everything.
My guess is that Hildegard was reflecting on Colossians 1:15-20 while writing the above…
2.
“A sophiological Christianity focuses on the path.”
“Sophia” is the Greek word for “wisdom.” This means that “Sophiological” is the study of wisdom, or words about wisdom.
Cynthia is the first person to introduce me to the term “Sophiological Christianity.” For the majority of my life, I understood Christianity through a “Soteriological” lens that focused on salvation or being saved. However, complementing that understanding with a “Sophiological” one was incredibly helpful.
In all honesty, it made whole books of the Bible make more sense. When your only framework for reading the Scriptures is figuring out how to be “saved,” you are left with an odd interpretive mode and must shoehorn every passage into being about salvation.
However, I now believe that a good amount of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek New Testament is full of “sophiological content/wisdom.” And, one does not even have to believe in order to appreciate the wisdom of the Scriptures. In fact, in my work with college students, emphasizing the wisdom of the Scriptures catches almost all of their attention.
I think we are at a point in Christian history when it is time to reclaim Christianity through a Sophiological lens.
3.
“If you do not learn to deny yourself, you can make no progress in perfection.”
Impulse control is absolutely one of the first skill sets to develop if anyone wants to be a spirituallymature person, let alone a mature person at all.
It is when we are utterly impulsive toward the vices that we dip into the lower/earlier/less mature versions of ourselves.
I think this is part of the sadness of addiction. Those of us with addictive personalities are dominated by the tyranny of the impulse, and it takes careful diligence and concerted effort to stay sober and well.
St. John of the Cross, without even realizing it, often did valuable psychological work in his writings!
4.
“Where men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be greater sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés.”
This past Tuesday was the monthly gathering of the Philly Chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society. We are few in number but mighty in conversation. (You can join for free here.)
We are going through New Seeds of Contemplation just one chapter at a time, and this most recent chapter (ch. 8) hit rather hard on the topics of crowds, community, and Christ’s odd holiness.
The quote above, which is taking “crowds” to task, reminded me much of Soren Kierkegaard. Both figures seemed to have an entirely negative understanding of the crowd, of groupthink, of swaths of people in which no one is known personally, and no one is held personally accountable.
I invite you to reread this quote slowly; it packs quite a punch.
5.
“The day will come when, after harnessing the winds, the tides and graviation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.“
As a theologian and a scientist, he believed Love is an actual force sustaining the cosmos. He believed that Love was as elemental a force as the winds, the tides, and gravity.
Marietta Jaeger Lane’s daughter Susie was kidnapped and murdered. She recounts wrestling with the concept of forgiveness to restorative justice educator Elaine Enns:
I grew up in a house where we were never allowed to be angry. I was told that to be angry was a sin…. It took two weeks of sitting at the campground picnic table waiting for any news of Susie for my rage to roil up through the many inhibitions I had placed on it. When I finally allowed myself to get in touch with my anger … I knew that I could kill the kidnapper with my bare hands and a smile on my face. Even before I knew what he had done to Susie, I could have killed him for the terror he put her through, for taking her away from us and the effect it had on my entire family.
However, after a major midnight wrestling match with God in which I tried to justify my “right” to rage and revenge, I “surrendered.” Because I believe in a God who never violates our freedom or free will, I gave God permission to change my heart. I promised to cooperate with God in whatever God could do to move my heart from fury to forgiveness.
There was a time in the beginning where I felt that if I forgave the kidnapper, I would be unfaithful to Susie. I also struggled with a belief common to victims of violence—that if I could stay angry and get revenge, I was incontrol.
I was catapulted into a very intense, spiritual journey, and spent many hours in prayer and reading scripture. God spoke to me frequently. It was a long, gradual process but, during that year, I came to realize three things:
In staying full of rage I was in fact handing my power over to the kidnapper, allowing his actions to change my value system and lead me away from the direction I wanted my life to go in.
In God’s eyes the kidnapper was just as precious as my little girl.
And if I wanted to live my Catholic faith with integrity, I was called to forgive and pray for my enemies.
Lane later became a human rights advocate:
As the months went by with no word of Susie, I also prayed to know what God’s idea of justice was. I came to understand that if Jesus is the word of God made flesh, then Jesus is the justice of God made flesh. As I looked at the life of Jesus in scripture I did not see someone who came to hurt, punish, or put us to death. Jesus came to heal and help us, to rehabilitate and reconcile us, to restore to us the life that was lost by “original sin.” God’s idea of justice is restoration, not punishment.
Make friends with the problems in your life. Though many things feel random and wrong, remember that I am sovereign over everything. I can fit everything into a pattern for good, but only to the extent that you trust Me. Every problem can teach you something, transforming you little by little into the masterpiece I created you tobe. The very same problem can become a stumbling block over which you fall, if you react with distrust and defiance. The choice is up to you, and you will have to choose many times each day whether to trust Me or defy Me. The best way to befriend your problems is to thank Me for them. This simple act opens your mind to the possibility of benefits flowing from your difficulties. You can even give persistent problems nicknames, helping you to approach them with familiarity rather than with dread. The next step is to introduce them to Me, enabling Me to embrace them in My loving Presence. I will not necessarily remove your problems, but My wisdom is sufficient to bring good out of every one of them.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Romans 8:28 (NLT) 28 And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
Additional insight regarding Romans 8:28: God works in “everything” – not just isolated incidents – for our good. This does not mean that all that happens to us is good. Evil is prevalent in our fallen world, but God is able to turn every circumstance around for our long-range good. Note that God is not working to make us happy but to fulfill his purpose. Note also that this promise is not for everybody. It can be claimed only by those who love God and are called by him, that is, those whom the Holy Spirit convinces to receive Christ. Such people have a new perspective, a new mindset. They trust in God, not in worldly treasures; their security is in heaven, not on earth. Their faith in God does not waver in pain and persecution because they know God is with them.
1st Corinthians 1:23-24 (NLT) 23 So when we preach that Christ was crucified, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense. 24 But to those called by God to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Activist Shane Claiborne lays out the distinct choice we can make to draw on grace or vengeance when seeking justice:
Violence is contagious. Violence begets violence. A rude look is exchanged for a cold shoulder. A middle finger for a honked horn. Hatred begets hatred. Pick up the sword and die by the sword. You kill us and we’ll kill you. There is a contagion of violence in the world; it’s spreading like a disease.
But grace is also contagious. An act of kindness inspires another act of kindness. A random smile is exchanged for an opened door. Helping someone carry their laundry or groceries makes them nicer. Randomly paying someone’s toll in the car behind you invites them to pay it forward. A single act of forgiveness can feel like it heals the world. Grace begets grace. Love rubs off on those who are loved….
There’s nowhere you can see the battle of grace and disgrace waged more vehemently than in the criminal justice system. When it comes to words like “justice,” people can say the same thing and mean something completely different.
Capital punishment offers us one version of justice. There is a sensibility to it: evil should not go without consequence. And there is a theology behind it: “An eye for an eye … a tooth for a tooth” [Exodus 21:23–24].
Yet grace offers us another version of justice. Grace makes room for redemption. Grace offers us a vision for justice that is restorative and dedicated to healing the wounds of injustice. But the grace thing is hard work. It takes faith—because it dares us to believe that not only can victims be healed, but so can the victimizers. It is not always easy to believe that love is more powerful than hatred, life more powerful than death, and that people can be better than the worst thing they’ve done.
These two versions of justice compete for our allegiance. One leads to death. The other can lead to life, and to healing and redemption and other beautiful things.
Mercy is a natural outflowing of grace:
It’s been said, “Mercy is not getting what you do deserve, and grace is getting what you don’t deserve.” Both are beautiful, but both can also seem like a betrayal of justice. That’s why justice can’t just come out of our heads, but it also has to flow from our hearts. Grace and mercy are things, just like forgiveness, that exist in the context of evil, and in contrast to it. When all is well, grace and mercy are hard to notice. But when things are rough, they are hard to ignore. They shine brightly. Just as light shines in the darkness, grace is radiant next to evil.
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From Kurt Thompson
Dear friend,
When we travel, whether for business or leisure, we often carry a quiet assumption: our “real life” is back home. Back where the rhythms are familiar. Back where the people who know us best are waiting. Back where we imagine we are most fully seen and known.
The days on the road can feel temporary, almost detached. As if we are living in parentheses until we return to the place where we belong.
Recently, after a full day of speaking, I was finishing dinner alone in a hotel bar. It was late. I was tired. I was already orienting myself toward the quiet of my room upstairs. And then a man approached my table. He had attended the talk and wondered if I would be interested in joining him, his wife, and another couple for conversation.
He offered his invitation with the explicit stated awareness that I might rather not, that I would rather be alone after my day of work, and that he and his friends would completely understand should I choose to demur. He and his friends had noticed me being alone and wanted to offer me the chance not to be if I so desired.
There it was—that small interior crossroads. The part of me that longed for solitude. And the deeper invitation to remain open.
I joined them.
The following evening, nearly the same time, nearly the same setting; this time, a woman approached. Once more, a similar story line: she and her husband, along with another couple had heard the lecture earlier that day and come for dinner afterward. Would I sit with the four of them for a meal?
Again, the choice.
Two nights. Two invitations. Two moments that could easily have been dismissed as interruptions to the life I imagined was waiting somewhere else.
But here is what those evenings quickly reminded me of: my “real” life is wherever I happen to be.
And here is what “where I happened to be” became. On both occasions I soon was awash in joy and delight—and energized—in hearing the stories of each of the people who had so kindly and generously come to find me. It turns out that none of these eight people over the course of the two evenings wanted something from me so much as they wanted to care for me by offering me hospitality at their tables. Moreover, they put their money where their mouths were. On both evenings they picked up the tab for my dinner.
What I could have imagined as an intrusion into my “down time” was instead a gift from the Spirit.
A gift of community.
A gift of others caring for me as we shared with each other where we each were finding ourselves in those present moments.
I cannot say it too often, not least to myself—our real lives are wherever we allow ourselves to be seen by and to see others.
On both occasions, what struck me was not the content of our conversations so much as the courage of their vulnerability. The willingness of couples to speak honestly. To risk being known. To say, in one way or another, this is who we are; this is our story. And in the simple act of telling the truth, community—between people who in my case an hour ago didn’t know each other at all—began to emerge.
We are not meant to live in isolation, even when we are away from home. The longing to be known does not pause when we cross time zones. Nor does our call to bear witness to one another’s lives. Community is not confined to geography; it is created whenever two or three people choose presence over distraction.
So often we imagine that meaning resides somewhere else—later, back home, once we return to our “real” relationships. But the kingdom of God meets us precisely where we are. It asks us to notice who is in front of us. To resist the temptation to live as if this moment doesn’t count.
Because it does.
Your “real” life is wherever you happen to be. And in that place—whether at your kitchen table or in a hotel bar—you are invited to see and be seen, to know and be known. This is how community forms. This is how love takes flesh.
The question is not whether your real life is happening.
The question is whether you are willing to enter it.
Grace is the foundation of God’s restorative justice. Father Richard writes:
The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel affirms the unique and rarely understood notion of grace. Midway through the book, God speaks: “I am going to renew my covenant with you; and you will learn that I am Yahweh, and so remember and be covered with shame, and in your confusion be reduced to silence, when I have pardoned you for all that you have done” (Ezekiel 16:62–63).
Here, the Jewish people had not even asked for or recognized that they might need forgiveness. When I first read this verse as a young friar, I was overcome by shock. Why has no one even pointed out this break in our reward-punishment logic to me? Ezekiel and Jeremiah were coming to the same conclusion around the same time, in the middle of the Babylonian exile. Just when we think the prophets would have been looking for reasons for such punishment, they broke out of its logic altogether. That’s the refining power of suffering, I should think. “I will treat you as respect for my own name requires, and not as your own conduct deserves” (Ezekiel 20:44). God’s only measure is Godself. We can never forget that.
In Ezekiel, Yahweh always acts and never reacts, as we humans tend to do. This is divine revelation at its fullest and freest! Restorative justice—the divine freedom to do good at all costs—is quite simply God being consistently true to Godself. It’s a total end run around retributive justice, which Ezekiel portrays as being beneath God’s dignity.
This theme of themes—God filling in all the gaps created by our ignorance, low self-esteem, and fear—reaches an apotheosis, in my judgment, in chapter 36. Here Ezekiel, at great length, completely disqualifies Israel as a partner by listing all their many adulteries. But immediately after stating Israel’s total unworthiness, their constant and selfish prostitution of the ways of covenant, Ezekiel says that Yahweh completely requalifies the same relationship from Yahweh’s side:
I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clear from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you…. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God (see Ezekiel 36:22–38).
No reciprocity is any longer expected or demanded. God can’t waste God’s time anymore. It is all God’s work and gift from beginning to end, if we are honest with ourselves. This is the promise of how God will work within history, and exactly why many of us firmly believe in “the universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21).
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A guest post by Brian McLaren
I grew up in an Evangelical background, I memorized many Bible verses as a child. Probably the first, and the most frequently recited, was from this passage, John 3:16. You may have memorized it to, or noticed it on T-shirts or signs at NFL games. “For God so loved the world,” the verse says, “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
The words “the world” and “everyone” have a universal reach. But when I learned the verse and heard it preached by Billy Graham and others, its universal reach was quickly and severely narrowed by the words “who believes in him.” God may love everyone, but only those who believe in him will escape punishment for their sins, which in our tradition, meant hell.
Believing in him (theological nerd alert) came to mean (for millions of us) believing in a doctrine called “penal substitutionary atonement theory.”*
That doctrine, I suspect, is what the organizers of the Revised Common Lectionary had in mind when they paired the steak of John 3 with the red wine of Romans 4 and the side salad of Genesis 12.
I still love John 3:16 and Romans 4, but penal substitutionary atonement theory stopped making sense to me decades ago. And part of my way out of the theory was the Genesis 12 passage in today’s readings, especially these words:
I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
The brilliant British missiologist Lesslie Newbegin said these words addressed the greatest heresy (or dangerous idea) in the history of monotheism. Many people understand being blessed by God as an exclusive matter, Newbegin said, as if God blesses some to the exclusion of others.
But no, Newbegin says. From the very beginning in the creation story in Genesis 1, when God blesses all creation – both day and night, both land and sea, both plant and animal, both animal and human – God’s blessings have been universal, because that is who God is and how God lives, an overflowing fountain of blessing. When God calls Abraham (then known as Abram), God doesn’t bless Abram and his descendants to the exclusion of others, but for the benefit of others.
God’s blessings are not exclusive, but rather instrumental.
I often recall an experience I had way way back in elementary school in the early 1960’s. Every day, we young students were assisted by older students in 5th or 6th grade. They were safety patrols, and they stood at intersections and held us back until they checked that there were no cars coming. Then they motioned for us to cross the road. I didn’t realize that what they did required hard work and sacrifice. They had to leave home earlier and come home later than the rest of us. They had to stand at their post in rain and snow and sleet and hail and hot sun and cold wind.
When at the end of fourth grade, our teacher asked for volunteers to be safety patrols next year, I wasn’t thinking of any of their hard work, sacrifice of comfort and time, or big responsibility. I wasn’t thinking of the special safety patrol training meetings I would have to attend.
I was thinking of four things. First, I was thinking I would get to wear a special white belt with an actual silver badge. Wow! Second, I was thinking about how I could boss other kids around! Double wow! Third, I was thinking of the fact that they could arrive at school late and leave early. Triple Wow! And fourth, I was thinking of the fact that safety patrols all went to an amusement park on a school day at the end of the year as a reward for their service, and they didn’t have to make up the schoolwork they missed. That was a home run of wows!
So I raised my hand high and sat up straight to volunteer, adding an “Oooo, oooo, pick me!” for emphasis. And to my great joy, a few days later I found my name on the list of next year’s safety patrols. Hallelujah!
Simply put, immature Brian was interested in being a patrol so I could gain status, even superiority over my fellow students, and for the reward of a day at the park at the end of the year.
That is the way many people taught John 3:16. All you have to do is raise your hand, say yes to the privileges promised to those who are chosen, and you will be pronounced as a “born again Christian,” which meant you would have a free ticket to safety, security, and enjoyment in heaven for yourself and yourself alone, forever.
But that is not what Genesis 12 or John 3:16 are actually about, contrary to a very popular belief. God chooses Abram, not for elite and exclusive privilege for his descendants alone, but for deep responsibility and service for all the nations of world. God chooses Abram not to the exclusion of others, but to the benefit and blessing of others. As Lesslie Newbegin said, you can’t claim God’s blessings for yourself, your race, your culture, or your religion, and leave out and “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Similarly, the profound image of being born again is not about getting a free “get out of hell” card and a free trip to the eternal amusement park above, to ride its roller coasters forever.
In John 3, Nicodemus, like many people today, is focused on the superiority of his in-group. “Teacher, we know,” he begins. Now as a lifelong teacher, I can tell you that whenever a student begins a conversation with “Teacher, we know,” things are not likely to go well. Students who want every answer to fit in with what they already know are operating within what psychologists and rhetoricians call confirmation bias: they only want to hear what conforms to and confirms their current thinking.
So Jesus goes to the heart of the issue: “I’m here to teach people about the kingdom of God, and the only way to see it is to be born from above.” To be born from above means to start life over again with a new identity, not as someone who is trying to be a carrier of elite privilege, but to be someone (like Abram, and like Jesus) who wanted to be blessed for the sake of others … who wanted to live, we might say, for the common good, or who wanted to join God in loving and healing the world.
Nicodemus is operating on what we might call a conventional and literalistic level, unaware of his biases and the limitations of his current perspective, so he asks questions that demonstrate his cluelessness. Jesus keeps challenging him to break out of his fourth-grade thinking, and join him as a safety patrol, so to speak, who isn’t working for himself alone, or even for his own little group or clique, but who is concerned for everyone’s welfare, everywhere, no exceptions. God’s desire, Jesus says, is not to condemn everyone or anyone, but to save everyone.
God’s desire, Jesus says, is not to condemn everyone or anyone, but to save everyone.
One final thought: If Lesslie Newbegin was right when he said that the widespread religious idea of exclusive blessing was a heresy, then we might say that many if not most Christians today, like Nicodemus, need to rethink their understanding of the words save, perish, eternal life, and kingdom of God.
Most people think “save” means “get to heaven.”
Most people think “perish” means “go to hell.”
And most people think “eternal life” means “life in heaven.”
And they think “kingdom of God” means heaven, the perfect place where souls go after death.
If we take John’s gospel seriously enough to challenge our own conventional and literalistic thinking, I believe we will come to see differently, that:
“Save” means liberate or set free from the current, corrupt “kingdoms of this world.”
“Perish” means “die or be exterminated through war and oppression.”
“Eternal life” means “life of the ages,” in contrast to “life in this present age or regime.” In other words, it means life “from above,” life on a higher level than life in the current economic, political, and social systems of our current human civilization. We will see it as a synonym for what Jesus later calls “abundant life.”
And “kingdom of God” means “what the world would be like if God were sitting on the throne instead of Caesar and Herod” and [insert names of other powerful, corrupt, misguided leaders here].
For many Cottage readers, everything I’ve said here sounds pretty familiar and unsurprising. But many of us might feel like Nicodemus when he was walking home from his nighttime conversation with Jesus.
Based on what we learn about Nicodemus later in the Fourth Gospel (John 7:50- 51, and John 19:39-42), he probably left with his mind racing with thoughts like these: “Maybe I don’t actually already have everything figured out. Maybe I need to rethink a lot of what I think I know.”
That is not a bad place to be, not a bad place at all. In fact, it sounds like being born from above … discovering a new identity … seeing the world in radically new ways.
****
Individual reflection question:
Where have you received grace that you didn’t earn, ask for, or even recognize you needed — and what did that do to you?
Group discussion question:
Rohr says God requalifies the relationship entirely from God’s side; McLaren says blessing is instrumental, not exclusive. What would it look like, concretely, for you to live as someone “blessed for others” this week — and where does that feel costly?
Father Richard Rohr emphasizes how God’s justice in the Bible is fundamentally loving and restorative rather than punitive.
As we read the Bible, God does not change as much as our knowledge of God evolves. I certainly recognize there are many biblical passages that present God as punitive and retributive, but we must stay with the text—and observe how we gradually let God grow up. Focusing on divine retribution leads to an ego-satisfying and eventually unworkable image of God, which situates us inside of a very unsafe and dangerous universe. Both Jesus and Paul observed the human tendency toward retribution and spoke strongly about the limitations of the law.
The biblical notion of justice, beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures with the Jewish prophets—especially Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea—is quite different. If we read carefully and honestly, we will see that God’s justice is restorative. In each case, after the prophet chastises the Israelites for their transgressions against Yahweh, the prophet continues by saying, in effect, “And here’s what Yahweh will do for you: God will now love you more than ever! God will love you into wholeness. God will pour upon you a gratuitous, unbelievable, unaccountable, irrefutable love that you will finally be unable to resist.”
God “punishes” us by loving us more! How else could divine love be supreme and victorious? Check out this theme for yourself: Read passages such as Isaiah 29:13–24, Hosea 6:1–6, Ezekiel 16 (especially verses 59–63), and so many of the Psalms. God’s justice is fully successful when God can legitimate and validate human beings in their original and total identity! God wins by making sure we win—just as any loving human parent does.
Love is the only thing that transforms the human heart. In the Gospels, we see Jesus fully revealing this divine wisdom. Love takes the shape and symbolism of healing and radical forgiveness—which is just about all that Jesus does. Jesus, who represents God, usually transforms people at the moments when they most hate themselves, when they most feel shame or guilt, or want to punish themselves. Look at Jesus’s interaction with the tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10). He doesn’t belittle or punish Zacchaeus; instead, Jesus goes to his home, shares a meal with him, and treats him like a friend. Zacchaeus’s heart is opened and transformed. Only then does Zacchaeus commit to making reparations for the harm he has done.
As Isaiah says of God, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8). Yet I am afraid we largely pulled God down into “our thoughts.” We think fear, anger, divine intimidation, threat, and punishment are going to lead people to love. We cannot lead people to the highest level of motivation by teaching them the lowest. God always and forever models the highest, and our task is merely to “imitate God” (Ephesians 5:1).
A Prophet’s Call for Justice
Monday, March 2, 2026
Richard Rohr considers how God used the prophets to upend notions of retributive justice, which prevail in most cultures to this day:
Justice, most of us believe, is when we send bad guys to jail. We imagine that we can point out the few who get caught and that then we can think of ourselves as a fair society. But we don’t dare convict the whole system of massive injustice and deceit. Maybe we are refusing to carry both guilt and responsibility? Taking responsibility for the common good is the more important moral mandate. And that is exactly where the prophets began. When the common good is the focus, preaching is not about imposing guilt and shame on individuals, but about giving vision and encouragement to society.
What history has needed is a positive and inspiring universal vision for the earth and the people of God. Harping about individual sin and convicting wrongdoers might shame a few individuals into halfhearted obedience, but in terms of societal change it has been a notorious Christian failure. Retributive justice has backfired because it is not founded in a positive love and appreciation of the good, the true, and the beautiful in the world or in creation. Negative energy feeds on itself, but positive energy evokes a positive vision.
So what is the Hebrew prophet Amos’s positive vision? When we read the way he ends his prophecy, it’s clear that the rewards and rejoicing are very much based in this earth and this world. According to Amos, God says:
I mean to restore the fortunes of my people Israel. They will rebuild their ruined cities and live in them, plant vineyards and drink their wine, dig gardens and eat their produce (Amos 9:14).
Radical unity with God and neighbor is the only way any of us truly heals or improves. Perhaps that is why Alcoholics Anonymous continues to make such an enduring difference in people’s lives. AA insists on personal responsibility for woundedness, the inner experience of a Higher Power, and some kind of ongoing small-group practice: the whole package of healthy religion.
By his final verses, Amos sees God as more merciful and more compassionate, even as he continues to lament Israel’s foolishness and failures:
That day I will re-erect the tottering hut of David, Make good the gaps in it, Restore the ancient ruins, And rebuild its ancient ruins (Amos 9:11).
Amos is inaugurating a revolution in our understanding of how divine love operates among us. This is no longer retribution or punishment, but a full reordering. It is such divine extravagance, a philosophy of love them into loving me back, that sets the pattern for all the prophets to follow. He represents a strong and clear movement away from retribution and punishment to what will become a new covenant of restorative justice that we see worked out in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and, of course, in the life of Jesus. This changes everything, or at least it should.
Father Richard invites us to take a journey of faith. It may be plagued by uncertainty, but we can trust in God’s presence along the way.
Sometimes it is only when we look back over the years, many of them spent in the wilderness, that we see the providence of God. When we were traveling through those years, none of them may have seemed very glorious. But when we look back, we can see how God was leading us, and we behold the beauty of God’s saving love.
Yet when we are in the middle of it, it may not seem very beautiful at all. It may seem quite ordinary. Usually we cannot tell for certain if God is acting in our life. In fact, we may be able to make a strong case against it. Just look at the prophets, Job, or Jesus! The way of faith is not a way of certitude.
I can imagine quite easily that Moses faltered on occasion. He must have hesitated and wondered whether God was really leading him, or whether he was just on some big ego trip. If Moses saw some visible apparition or heard some audible sounds which made him absolutely certain that he was right, Moses’s way would not have been a way of faith. It would have been a way of knowledge.
We are all called to a way of faith. At each step God asks us to trust, to say yes, to put our lives in God’s hands. It’s like walking around in a pitch-dark room, afraid that we’re going to bump into something or trip or fall. We put our hands out in front of us and walk very slowly. We want desperately to have our pathway illuminated. We want to know where we are going and how we are going to get there. Yet a voice comes to us out of the darkness, asking us to trust. We want certitude, but instead God asks us to have faith.
Our faith and our trust, then, are in God—not in our own cleverness, strategies, or planning, not in our status or money. In the desert, all our idols are taken away from us and our security is gone.The desert, the darkness, is the school of surrender, the place for learning total dependence on God.
Very often we experience faith in its purest form when we are in the midst of suffering. Perhaps we grew up picturing ourselves as some kind of glorious martyr (or perhaps that was just me), but when we are in the middle of it, it’s not glorious at all. It all seems so meaningless, so unjust and wrong, yet that’s the heart of the suffering. The essence of the desert experience is that we just want to get out it. If we could find a pattern in it, it would have some meaning. If we could find some purpose in it, it might give us a sense of direction. We truly suffer when we can find neither of those things, and yet even then, God is present.
“Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things pass away. God never changes. Patience obtains all things. They who have God lack nothing. God alone is enough.”
As a Head-oriented person on the Enneagram (I am an Enneagram 5), I am most prone to fall into fearful thinking. Shame does not really get to me, and neither does anger (though I can get to both in certain circumstances).
So this prayer or piece of wisdom from Teresa of Avila has stuck with me for quite a while. “Let nothing disturb you” gets to me right off the bat, but then it follows up with “Let nothing frighten you.”
This week, I recorded another Begin Again podcast (The link is below.)
Although it was interrupted a few times by our puppy, Maggie, it helped to anchor me more throughout the day.
Teilhard was a French Jesuit priest who was also a paleontologist and archaeologist. All this means is that Teilhard had a long view of time. For him, he was not threatened by the idea that it might have taken the universe 13.8 billion years to get to you and me, and it might take another 13.8 billion years for the full Christ Project to come to fruition!
God clearly has a profound appreciation for the slow unfolding of time, and that is an uncomfortable truth for us, who live in time.
3.
“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.“
The three letters of John in the New Testament are letters that I do not visit often. Most people find good things in 1 John and then trail off when they come to 2 John or 3 John.
One thing that is fascinating is how the Johannine letters use the symbolic language of “light and darkness” and use absolute statements to make a point. There isn’t a whole lot of paradox in 1 John! It is rather straightforward and black-and-white in its thinking, which is what I think gives it such a punch when you read it.
“If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.”
Dang.
That is convicting.
Of course, my judgmental mind goes toward people whom I believe are “walking in darkness,” but that is using the Bible inappropriately.
I should be focused on myself (in a healthy way).
I, of all people, need to check myself and evaluate every so often whether or not I am living “according to the light of God as revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Hopefully, if I am even asking the question of myself, that is an indication of something!
4.
“We must believe that, morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.”
Surely, none of you are surprised to see Abraham Joshua Heschel again.
As a Jewish philosopher and rabbi, he was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton, and was quite outspoken during the Civil Rights Movement.
5.
“Myths convey the essential truths, the primary reality of life itself.”
If it is a really good story, I will want to watch it again or read it again.
However, in the past week, we watched Marty Supreme, and I must say, I didn’t enjoy it. On one level, it kept your attention because the main character isn’t exactly a hero and is rather doggone narcissistic about achieving his own dream.
If the movie was trying to depict reality, it didn’t align with my understanding of reality.
Yes, my understanding of the world allows space for chaos, paradox, and even evil, but ultimately those things will have to bow and exit before goodness, beauty, truth, and love are given their full expression.
The stories we tell… they matter.
And they not only matter because they potentially describe what is, but also because they can inspire us towards what might be. I believe that there is an essential truth: there is always hope that things can turn for the better, that people can change and grow, and that we do not have to be stuck in our ways.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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