Here’s the thing about αμαρτία

This excerpt from the Orthodox Trisagion prayers (Thrice-Holy prayers) grabbed my attention 27+ years ago:

O Lord, cleanse us from our sins. O Master, pardon our transgressions. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

That left an impression that is still with me.

I learned fairly early in my catechesis that sin in Greek is αμαρτία, commonly rendered “hamartia” in English. It literally means “missing the mark.”

As an Evangelical, and then as a Calvinist (though to a lesser degree), I’d gotten the impression that “sin” was simply rebellion against God. But that wasn’t true to all that I saw in me that missed the mark. There was self-absorption feeding obliviousness to the concerns of others. I didn’t choose that to rebel against God. There was such limitation that I sometimes didn’t know what I should do and chose something that harmed others. I also didn’t choose that to rebel against God (I’d have preferred omniscience).

The three sentences from the Trisagion Prayers seemed a perceptive taxonomy where my Church and pastors saw only uniformity: rebellion. For some kinds of mark-missing we need cleansing, for others pardon, for still others, healing.

My soul said “Yes! They’ve got it!” And so the case for Orthodoxy grew weightier.

I don’t remember mentioning this before. Perhaps it will help someone with the same perception I had.

But now that I’ve got that down on paper (so to speak), connections occur to me. Maybe my Protestant mentors didn’t think about human failures that aren’t acts of rebellion toward God because the common Protestant theory of atonement (basically, God the Father already gave God the Son the punishment we deserve for our rebellion and so He won’t punish us as well) is an uncomfortable fit for non-rebellious mark-missing like self-absorption and lack of omniscience, for which we need something more than pardon.

To call that idea half-baked may be too generous, but now it’s on my mind.

How liberal theology works

I pay a lot of critical attention to American Evangelicalism because in important ways it was my religious world and we’re collectively still swimming in its latest iterations.

Also, I don’t think I ever understood the Protestant mainline. I recently got some help in that regard (recently because I’m gradually catching up with the podcast series from which this transcript comes):

Fr. Stephen: … I don’t think people fundamentally understand how liberal theology works, and this can give us a window into how liberal theology works. Liberal theology is in keeping with Hegel, the Hegel we’re rejecting on this show, just to be clear. Not promoting liberal theology, but we need to understand liberal theology and how it works.

The reason I’m just saying “liberal theology”— I’m not saying “liberal” as opposed to “conservative.” I’m saying “liberal” in the sense of post-Enlightenment, that doesn’t think the Enlightenment was a bad thing. I’m talking about post-Enlightenment theology; I’m talking about— Well, let’s get to brass tacks. …

But liberal theology essentially, like Hegel, takes whatever point in time they stand at as being the apex of history to that point. This means— And I’ve critiqued it this way on the show before, but I’m going to do it again. This means that liberal theology is always innately chauvinist, at least somewhat racist, colonial, because, again, you have to take your culture and civilization as being the apex, which means the other ones who might disagree with you are somehow primitive, backward, unenlightened, etc. So there’s always overtones of that, always overtones of that within liberal theology. But you take your point as being the apex of history to that point, and you ascribe the developments that have led to that apex as being the work of the Holy Spirit.

So if now we, European-derived Western culture, have a new understanding of gender or sexuality or biological sex or any other ethical, moral issue of who God is, whatever—whatever has developed historically, in this Western—dare I say often white—culture, whatever is developed in that culture, this is the work of the Holy Spirit that has brought us to this, and therefore it is endorsed, and we re-shape our theology based on this. So a new understanding of gender that arises within culture and society is, for them—the work of God has brought that about within society.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… This is where you hear people use language like “the right side of history.”

Fr. Stephen: So it doesn’t matter if the person questioning that is from the same culture but who says, “Hey, I don’t this historical development—” they’re doing more like what we’re advocating for, which is saying, “Well, no, we have to sift through this and say what is from God and what isn’t”; or if it’s someone from another culture, who might have another skin color, might be from another continent. It doesn’t matter who’s questioning it: whoever’s questioning it is innately backwards, is innately rejecting the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is also where you hear people say things like: “It’s 2023!” Like that’s an argument! “It’s current year!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but you have to understand, this is their understanding. And this is why trying to take any kind of approach with them, of “well, but this previous understanding…” or “this thing from the past,” no matter what it is, fundamentally doesn’t work, because they have this underlying presupposition that their culture now at this point in time is the apex of all human cultures and civilization and that God has brought it there. This is why, when I— when you hear me critiquing liberal theology, it’s often from what sounds like a liberal perspective, like I’ll say to people who express these ideas— They’ll be attacking, for example, African bishops in their own church for not going along. What’s nice about me using that example is there are at least three different denominations I could be talking about.

…

When they, as white, bourgeois Americans or Europeans, attack African bishops and call them “backwards” and all of these things for not being on-board with their new liberal consensus, I will call them white supremacists, because that’s what that is.

Fr. Andrew: Colonialism.

Fr. Stephen: Right? That is colonialism. It’s: all the things they claim to hate, they’re actually doing. But that’s why I— If people hear me critique it that way, I know some people might get confused, but that’s why I critique it that way, because that’s the only critique that can function on their own presuppositions. That’s the only critique that’s valid from their— based on their own presuppositions. Any critique from tradition is going to fall flat on its face, because they’ve substituted—instead of our understanding of tradition, they have this alien understanding of history, so trying to talk tradition doesn’t work. That’s the only kind of critique—

And that’s because, ultimately, that line of thinking is an ouroboros. It’s a snake eating its own tail. It can’t— Its first principles are incoherent. That’s why you can critique their beliefs based on their beliefs, because they don’t fit together. But so, we add that at the end this is the deviant view of how the Spirit works and how Tradition works, that we need to be aware of, because I don’t think we can have productive dialogue with people who have imbibed liberal theology and who are coming at things from that perspective when we come at them from a completely alien perspective that shares none of their presuppositions. I don’t think there’s any way for that to be productive, other than, you know, maybe just saying, “You have to abandon everything you think you know. Change everything,” which may work sometimes, and maybe if you show them how self-refuting their own ideas are, maybe that’ll help that happen, but there’s a fundamental lack of communication between those who have fallen prey to that kind of liberal theology and the rest of us. That it would be good for their sakes if we could find a bridge to try to bring them back to the truth.

Fathers Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen DeYoung on the Lord of Spirits podcast for December 29, 2023.

I share this because I found it helpful in understanding United Methodists and Episcopalians over my lifetime. They’re treating the Zeitgeist as the Heiliger Geist, and they contemn Africans in their communions whose Zeitgeist isn’t keeping up with the latest fashions.

Secularizations

After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God. This surely is relevant to my inquiry into Carlo Lancelotti’s Touchstone article.

Truth gets a rocky start

Schaff’s work in America got off to a rocky start. In his inaugural address at Mercersberg, The Principle of Protestantism, Schaff argued that American Protestantism needed to reject its antihistorical, sectarian tendencies and recognize its place within the historic church, which had organically developed through time.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation.

Schaff wasn’t wrong.

Religious versus Secular

Why accept the substantivist definition of religion as about belief in transcendence? Taylor thinks he needs such a definition in order to keep his subject matter properly delimited; if nationalism were a religion, then the whole religious/secular distinction would get thrown into confusion. But there might be good reasons to question this distinction. The distinction has come under increasing scrutiny from scholars who view the religious/secular distinction as both historically constructed and politically motivated.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Authenticity

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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