If this project is trying to sense how the Gospel communicates hope and guidance to our current and emerging situations, then we can’t afford to get lost in anachronistic abstractions, born more of Zoroaster and Plato than of Moses, David, Ezra, Paul, and the evangelists. Apologetics rightly communicates the absolute and ageless Truth to the questions men propose in the context of their times and cultures. But those answers then become a part of the time and culture to which they responded, and ought not hold us back or guide us wrongly in sensing what the Gospel says to another people at another point in their inquiry.

The Gospel does not draw people to an earlier time and place where it once had answers it now lacks. Only past portrayals of the gospel are so lacking. Those portrayals, not the Gospel, Itself, are invalidated by failure to be relevent. The Gospel always is, and always will be.

I remember chanting some nonsense received from Augustine of Hippo as some sort of catachism. Able to sin, not able not to sin, able not to sin, not able to sin…. the progression of man, as clever in composition as the riddle of the sphynx, and pleasing, as an abstraction, in an Occam’s razor kind of way. But I think the distillation of all the violations of man to a single (latin?) word too much disguises the specifics of sin. Tresspass — a violation of boundaries. Debt — an incomplete covenant. Transgression — a violation of statute. Shortcoming, the greek amartyr (?), most often translated “sin”, being the corruption which makes us unable to live up to what God intends of us, and which being made incorruptable will enable of us (in line with Augustine’s concept of sin), and my favorite — iniquity, which is so often propounded as some kind of hedonistic deviance, but is literally a violation of social and economic justice.

Only by examining sin in its Biblical particulars, and discarding the theological abstractions of Augustine’s time, or Aquinas’s time, or Armenius’s time, will the Gospel speak in its own ageless and absolute manner, rather than anachronisms that fail to respond to any need but that of our own vanity.

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A puff away from 3 packs a day