Peet Schooenberg S.J. wrote “Original Sin and Man’s Situation” in the 1960s.

As he saw it, in a nutshell, sin is the guilt resulting from the decision to do evil.  This decision was conditioned by one’s situatedness in a disordered world.  The world is in fellowship with sin.  This corresponds to the condition of Original Sin^ME.

(Here comes the caveat: Wiley warns: In order to get to the meat of the nut, rather than what is here presented as “in the shell”, you have to read the author himself.  So Schooenberg is on the list for a future blog.)

Schooenberg’s formulation does not address the nature of the transition that made our disordered world possible.  It corresponds to the claim by medieval theologians that Original Sin was a “sin of nature”.  As such, the Fall is existential.  It is part of the individual’s environment.  The person accommodates.  But is she doomed?

The Fall offers the possibility of Redemption.  At root is a refusal to love.  At root is an absence of an interior life of faith and love of God.  But such a root, when planted in the soil of Christian community, the community of the redeemed, has the capacity to sprout in a most surprising way.  The water of baptism enters into the soil.  Through the soil, sanctifying grace enters a root that, if left alone, would grow into “refusal and absence (Marx’s word for it: “alienation”)”.  With the waters of sanctifying grace, the root begins to grow into “what it refuses to do and what it lacks”.

In many ways, Schoonenberg’s ideas mirror Rienhart’s:

For Reinhart: “Will to power”(anxiety(egoism))

For Schoonenberg: “Sanctifying grace”(baptism(growing out of refusal to love and absence of an interior life of faith and love of God)

With “baptism” paired against “existential anxiety”, charges of Pelagianism seem unfounded.  The gap cannot be bridged by personal well-intended regimens.

Promises of a New Age of Self-Improvement are merely fashions of the “will to power”.

Reinhold Niebuhr (d. 1971) saw “anxiety” (or better, “existential anxiety”) as the reaction to the situation of personal and social sin formulated above.  His focus is on the situated individual (who is contextualized by theology).

Anxiety belongs to the realm of the situation.  It directly correlates to Liberation Theology’s milieu of personal and social sin (that is contextualized by Original Sin^ME (ME = in the modern era).

Anxiety situates “one’s own stance towards the milieu of personal and social sins” when that stance is “egoism”.

“Egoism” is an act of the imagination.  “Egoism” is the feeling of me-first.  “Egoism” fantasizes that “I can protect me, promote me, survive by me-alone, and so forth”.

A “will to power” finally contextualizes anxiety.  The “will to power” uses words, tools and appeals to manipulate the me-in-the-situation of anxiety(egoism).

Thus, the individual’s experience of the situation that is contextualized by Original Sin^ME may be written as a nested term:  will to power(anxiety(egoism)).

An Archaeology of the Fall complements Niebuhr’s insights by noting that speech-alone words define “reality” and in the process “construct society” regardless of the consequences.

One cannot even call our inclination to use words, tools and appeals for assuaging the anxieties that well up through our fragile egos; “temptation”.  It is part of our nature.  We know not what we do.

How could one re-image the central idea of Liberation Theologies in light of An Archaeology of the Fall?  Some sort of fusion of the idea of the “sin of the world” and the concept of the Fall appears attractive.

I do not speak as a theologian, merely as the fictional entity that I regard myself.

A transition from hand-speech talk to speech-alone talk entailed a change in semiotic characteristics in the way we talk.  The human Lebenswelt changed from a world when talk seemed referential to a world where talk created referentiality.  Rather than naming “things” or “patterns” that you could point to (with hand-speech talk), humans created “symbolic orders or systems of names” that generated “social constructions” (with speech-alone talk).

To me, this transition recalls the same sensibility expressed by Liberation theologians in regards to Original Sin^ME (Original Sin in context of the modern era) as Social Sin.

The sensibility can be expressed in terms of nestedness.

The transition created the possibility for the production of symbolic orders that (as in chapter 12C of An Archaeology …) inspired social constructions of “what they name”.

These social structures promoted personal sin, instituted injustice, and created a field of biases that directed the individual away from God (and toward the social constructions of that particular symbolic order).

What puts the situations containing these social constructions into context?

Answer: The Doctrine of Original Sin^ME.

Thus, the transition in our Lebenswelt may be portrayed as a nested set:

“What puts these into context”(social constructions(transition to speech-alone))

Expressed in terms of Liberation Theology:

Original Sin^ME(personal and social sin(Bible texts describing ‘sin of the world’))

As an aside: Ironically, Liberation Theology pursued “social justice” (by “advocating” for the poor, and so forth) while setting the stage for “cosmic injustice” (by promoting and justifying Marxist leaning dictatorships that eventually oppressed everyone, including the churches that originally supported them).

“Liberation theology” was popularized in Latin America in the 1970s in response to the oppression, poverty and injustice endemic to that region.  Leaving the metaphysical theories of the Catholic scholastic traditions behind, they forged new theories based on the social sciences and Marxist perspectives.   They intended to raise awareness of the social dimension of Original Sin.

In addition to personal sin (the product of individual concupiscence) and Original Sin (the universal consequences of the Fall), liberation theologians included Social Sin (the consequence of individual sinful acts and embodied in social structures).  But then, what would be the difference between Original Sin and Social Sin?

The idea of Social Sin may be grounded in both St. Paul’s letters and John’s Gospel.  But, the Catholic College of Cardinals ended up rejecting the idea that the biblical “sin of the world” equaled the doctrine of Original Sin.

In Chapter 6, Wiley covered “Original Sin in a Contemporary Context”.

After modern thinkers rejected what medieval and patristic writers assumed, rejected the historicity of Genesis 2.4 on, and offered their own alternative “formulations” of humankind’s sins, Christians were left to either cling to their old (discredited) illusions or forge a new synthesis.

Is there anything valid about what the medieval and patristic writers imagined about fallen human nature?  How should Christians situate the Genesis text in light of the lack of historicity? Is there another way to conceptualize Original Sin?

Of course, An Archaeology of the Fall addresses these questions, in 2012, by proposing an answer to the question: Why civilization?

Wiley presented three thinkers who wrote 50 years prior, in the 1960s.  The next few blogs look at these thinkers.

Finally, how does the postmodern (Age of Semiotics) An Archaeology of the Fall change the picture?

Doctrines of Reason and Resistance become examples for a semiotic-oriented Doctrine of Original Sin based on the recognition that cryptotheological doctrines are symbolic orders.  These symbolic orders exclude other potential symbolic orders. Social constructions always have unintended consequences (that is, consequences that cannot be symbolized by the formulating order).

“The society that we live in” changes to “the social constructions that we live in”.

“The various imaginings that support cryptotheological symbolic orders (the various anthropologies of “what went wrong?”)” change to” an artistic (imaginative) parallel between the Biblical stories in Genesis 2.4 – 11 and the adoption of speech-alone talk”.

Furthermore, the structure of modern imaginative anthropologies most likely harken to the – originating, but now impossible to return to – world of hand-speech talk.

Why?  The entire frame of

Cryptotheologies(“social construction”(nature of humans))

is a symptom of the change of Lebenswelt that occurred when humans adopted speech-alone talk, which has vastly different semiotic qualities than hand-speech talk.  And, inexplicably but importantly, the change from one way of talking to the other allows us to re-mythologize the Stories of Adam and Eve.

So let me complement Wiley’s Chapter 5 with this list of changes:

Latin Age changed to Age of Ideas

Medieval changed to Modern

Theocentric changed to anthropocentric

Doctrine of Original Sin changed to Doctrines of Reason and Resistance

“The fallen world that we live in” changed to “the society that we live in”

The anthropologies concocted from the Story of the Fall changed to various “anthropologies of what went wrong”

The image of “Genesis 1-11 as history” changed to the image of “Genesis 1-11 as myth (completely non-historical)

By the time we get to Rousseau and Kant, the Enlightenment is well on its way to symbolizing the post-Latin Age Europe.  Each pointed to some aspect of past debates on Original Sin.

Rousseau proposed a substitute to Fall itself.  What went wrong?  He identified the Fall as the adoption of the cultural value of “private property” at the start of Civilization.

Kant proposed an ethical substitute for Sanctifying Grace.  The categorical imperative relied on Reason and stated that “you should act as if ‘the maxim from which you act’ were to become, through your will, universal law.” (At the same time, Kant’s categorical imperative justified Resistance).

From the previous blog, I can put each into a box.

Rousseau proposed an anthropology.  (The Anthropology belongs to the same category as the imagination, since one can imagine this pre-civilized condition but one has never encountered it.)

Kant proposed a Doctrine of Reason and Resistance.  (For Reason, consider the actor not committing an act, such as jaywalking, because, if jaywalking became a universal law, many people would get injured.  For Resistance, consider the actor adopting a cause, such as “not owning private property”, then forcing that stance on others, because it is consistent with the maxim that this “act” should become universal law.)

After the previous blog, Wiley’s treatment of history should be a pleasure to read.

However, maybe I should point out that the previous blog suggests a mind-boggling range of causalities between the nested worlds of symbol(index(icon), ordering(participating(imagining)) “normal context”(situation(“whatever happened”)) and so forth.  Here are three:

Changes in any one category alter the other two categories.

The law of unintended consequences applies only to the situation.

The presence of unintended consequences alters the imagination (before the normal context is altered).

Also, the previous blog allows a nested image of Modernity:

Doctrines of Reason & Resistance(Society(Anthropology)

The Renaissance re-centering of the imagination from a theocentric to an anthropocentric worldview empowered cryptotheological Doctrines of Reason and Resistance (that found full expression in the Enlightenment traditions) which, in turn, contextualized the emergence of the “Society” of Industry and Science characteristic of Modernity.