Sin: The Early History of an Idea [Kindle Edition]

Fredriksen is one of my favorite scholars. Her writing is lucid, engaging, and authoritative in its assertions. I was already familiar with the material in this book from the lectures that preceded it, the 2007 Spencer Trask lectures at Princeton University. Videos of these fine lectures are available online.

This book is not what you would expect, however. Though the book art includes the theme of the bitten apple and the Eden snake, this is an atypical of the discussion of sin. You won't come away with a robust biblical understanding of sin, necessarily, but you will come away having been guided through some of the thought processes of early Christianity's theologians as they flesh out themes such as cosmology, flesh, death, ancient monotheism, conversion, etc. What Fredriksen is able to offer here are some of the key observations she has made about these topics in a scholarly career spanning from Jesus to Paul to Augustine. Though I strongly disagree with her at points (particularly on her reading of Romans), what she does here is truly fascinating.

O.k., so let me start out by saying that it was the first Amazon review of this book that got me to buy it--no offense to anyone, but I felt like there just had to be more to it, and judging after a paragraph or two didn't sit right with me.

There was.

I thought it was a terrific book--very well-written, and technical in its way without requiring a master's degree to decipher.

Fredriksen's Prologue begins:

"Jesus of Nazareth announced the good news that God was about to redeem the world. Some 350 years later, the church taught that the far greater part of humanity was eternally condemned. The earliest community began by preserving the memory and the message of Jesus; within decades after his death, some Christians asserted that Jesus had never had a fleshly human body at all....What accounts for this great variety in ancient Christian teachings? The short answer is: dramatic mutations in Christian ideas about sin. As these ideas grew and changed in the turbulence of Christianity's first four centuries, so too did others: ideas about God, about the physical universe, about the soul's relation to the body, about eternity's relation to time; ideas about Christ the Redeemer--and, thus, ideas about what people are redeemed from."

Fredriksen takes the reader through the words of Jesus and Paul, then second-century thinkers including Valentius, Marcion, and Justin Martyr, and culminating brilliantly in a comparison of the thought of Origen and Augustine.

"Uh...o.k., who?" you might be saying as you see some of those names.

They're some of the important historical voices in a wide-ranging debate spanning centuries on the topic of sin. Some of their views became important to the teaching and understanding of the church. Others represent intellectual roads not taken.

What emerges is some fascinating digging into a complex philosophical topic that connects Christian and non-Christian thinking, and the growth of the church as an institution seeking to respond to different challenges, some of them perennial, others not.

Frederiksen did not set out to write a book that was devotional or dogmatic; she has no particular stake in an apologetic approach that supports or critiques how Christians "should" or "should not" think about sin. Reverence is not its aim; that said, neither is irreverence its guilty pleasure. But readers in search of faith-oriented teaching about the doctrine of sin need to place this work properly in the field of intellectual history and be open to the notion that doctrines are--or at least were--debated and contested, and that Christian teaching is far from uni-vocal on many questions.

I will say that Chapters 1 and 2 were very good, but the real "ta-da!" came for me in Chapter 3 and the Epilogue. These are the moments when all of the detail in the first two chapters blossoms most fully. If you get the book, DON'T MISS Chapter 3.

"Yes, sir," says Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife to the minister as he is coming out of church and others, too, are complimenting the minister on his sermon. "That's just one subject you just can't talk enough about. Sin." Barney must have been asleep, for that wasn't the minister's subject, but it was a good guess. Sin has been a point of concern before the beginning of Christianity. In _Sin: The Early History of an Idea_ (Princeton University Press), Paula Fredriksen considers seven important figures in the early church and reveals that sin was a foundational concept for all but that it was as well different for all. In addition, the ideas about how God could have created imperfect beings, and how they can be saved, and when they would be saved, all changed between the thinkers during the first four Christian centuries. Fredriksen, a professor who is regarded as an expert on early Christianity, here provides what she says is "an aerial survey of the idea of sin" during that period. It is a pithy, enjoyable tour of a concept that even in the beginning was malleable depending upon circumstances. Fredriksen's book is also useful for showing us how even in the earliest formation of ideas about sin, it was what "those other people" do.

Naturally, the first teacher Fredriksen takes up is Jesus. He emphasized the sins as understood in his Jewish culture; he knew the audience to whom he was speaking. Sin was, especially, breaking the ten commandments. Paul delivered his message on sin mostly to gentiles who lived among the Jewish diaspora, and his concept of sin was aimed at them. Paul was horrified by the sin of pagan idolatry and the fornication connected with it; give up those sins, he taught, and enter God's imminent kingdom though baptism courtesy of God's son. After Paul's time, when it was clear that the end times were still sometime in the mysterious future, theologians began to teach about the meaning of sin in relation not about how to get a good seat for the Apocalypse but how to get salvation after death. Gnostics like Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin in the second century taught that sin came from ignorance of God, and stressed an intellectual approach of bashing ignorance by study of the scriptures. The study, however, had to be done with just the right allegorical and mystical interpretations. In her final chapter, Fredriksen considers the rival ideas of Origen of Alexandria and the far more famous St. Augustine of Hippo. Origen thought that everything had souls, even stars and demons, and that these souls all were fallen. They had fallen long before time had started. There was no evil, just learning situations, and all the souls learned, because if any of them failed in gaining salvation, that would be a failure on God's part. Since he wanted universal salvation, and since he is God, he would get his way. If Origen's God is infinitely generous, Augustine's was infinitely angry. Augustine's God had created humans born in sin since Adam's fall. Jesus had been born of a virgin and without any male orgasm, and Augustine "theologized" every subsequent male orgasm as being a point of shame-producing pleasure that made any resultant infant a branch of the sin started by Adam. Augustine taught that no one could know how God made the decision in individual cases about who to save and who not, but that the great majority would be damned to a hell of eternal torment. Well, Augustine became a saint and a founder of the church's outlook; and Origen, against whom Augustine deliberately wrote, is regarded as a father of the church, but he is not a saint and his ideas were declared heretical. The ideas of both these men seem peculiar to me, but I can't help thinking we'd have a jollier world if Origen had prevailed.

Ancient ideas of sin, Fredriksen teaches, are culturally constructed, and so must our modern ideas be. She gives an amusing epilogue to show how we moderns are far more likely to confess "I made a mistake," rather than "I did something wrong," and asks, "How can anyone punish anyone for making a mistake? _Everyone_ makes mistakes." She also points out that even people who merely make mistakes don't have much problem knowing sin when they see other people sinning. It's not just us. She says that Justin held that "the correct notion of God (that is, Justin's notion) leads to virtuous behavior," and that Origen recommended "the teachings of the true (that is, Origen's) church," and that Augustine said that some healing might be extended to "a member of the true (that is, Augustine's) church." You can't rely on any definition of sin to be unchanging. Fredriksen doesn't say it, but I will: use kindness towards others as much as you possibly can, and you won't go far wrong.