RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

I am always in this question/condition myself. It is the unwavering devotion to, reliance on and desire to please Him that matters to Him, not the specific deeds, which are always going to be fraught with ambiguity and therefore mixed with error, for everyone, regardless. You have the devotion to, the reliance on and the desire to please Him, unwaveringly, right into the mouth of hell if need be.

It is the same as how you feel about your children. You know their life is mixed with good and bad, even when they intend only good, which they, like you, surely do. You overlook all of that because of its intrinsic and unavoidable ambiguity. Rather, you look at the degree and the constancy of their devotion to you, and not even to you personally but even more so to their own essential natures, which you share with them and they with each other. You look at their reliance on your accumulated wisdom and ability to help them. You look at their desire to please you, not to be slavishly obedient but to want to please you by doing what makes them proud of themselves and you proud of them, by coming up to the standard which is set by their essential nature as children of God. When you are satisfied with their devotion, their reliance and their desire to please in this proper way, by coming up to the standard they and you together embody — as do all of us who are human — you do not care about their crotchets, their lapses, their errors, their uncertainties. You do not care about them because you know they are merely evidence and elements of the ambiguity of existence and therefore not essential to the relationship between you and your children.

So it is with God and you.

Now, you need to understand something important about sin. The Baptists did not teach you about this because they forgot it long ago as they formulated their dogmas. No other denomination, either, is going to teach you this because they have all forgotten it long ago as they formulated their dogmas.

Following is doctrine, not dogma, classic Christian doctrine regarding sin. Doctrine is learning or expressed wisdom derived from experience of phenomena and developed as description of participation in existence, in life. Dogma is application of doctrine, hopefully accurately but not always so, to specific issues of worship, piety, daily life of the faithful, etc.

Sin is a theological term of art and of very ancient usage. It refers to a phenomenon far deeper than what we usually take it to mean. We usually take the word to mean doing bad things, such as breaking laws, moral and/or civil, and/or Biblical Commandments. In other words, when we do bad things we say we have sinned or are sinners. Especially do we say we are sinners when we feel we have a propensity for doing bad things, such as deleterious habits.

But none of those things are meant by the word sin in classical Christian doctrine. Those are errors, serious and needing attention, but they are nowhere near the seriousness of sin. They are evidence and elements of the ambiguity of life, wherein right and error, good and bad are mixed in such a way that doing one necessarily entails doing the other. That is the meaning of ambiguity: it means that even when you do bad you do good and even when you do good you do bad. Ambiguity is the condition of everything that exists and it is simply that, a condition, a phenomenon. Nor is ambiguity itself either sin or error.

Sin is a very, very serious situation, serious unto death, as the Bible says. It is in another dimension entirely from either the mixture of good and bad that is existence or the characterization of existence as ambiguous. Sin is fundamental.

Side-bar on evil: evil, in classical doctrine, refers to something other than either sin, which we will get to next, or the good and bad of ambiguous existence. Evil refers to structures of destruction which get going in the personal, the spiritual and the historical dimensions. These are unambiguous in character, at least by late in their longevity, which is always limited temporally as well as spatially. There is no anti-God, no “second” beside Him. Evil arises when sin, which we are coming to describe, is unremediated by Grace. Evil has no independent existence. It is entirely dependent on the power of Grace being withheld so that it can turn more and more destructive until it destroys itself or is met on a field of battle and destroyed by forces inspired by Grace. The latter case is an ironic remediation of evil by Grace in that Grace saves evil, a structure of destruction, by destroying it.

Now, sin refers to the condition of estrangement between creature and creator when creator withholds Grace to the extent of allowing creature to suppose that he/she is independent, self-sufficient, even self-originating. Sin, as Luther said, following Augustine and the rest of classical Christian ontological theology, is the absence of Faith. Sin is not deeds. It is the condition of radical estrangement, creature-caused but creator-allowed.

Sin is the condition your children would be in if you had not fed and clothed them and kept them warm and educated them and loved their mother and taken care of her, in each of the thousand, thousand ways of fulfilling your duties as a father and husband. Imagine what would be their condition had you not done those things. They depended on you, they had gradually increasing self-sustaining abilities but never completely and for long years never enough to maintain their life much less grow it. Your Grace, channeling God’s to them, enabled absolutely and continuing indefinitely their growth in Grace rather than their descent into the condition of sin, of estrangement from Love.

This is the way to understand sin. Sin is a condition of estrangement, not bad deeds. Bad deeds can be corrected. Sin cannot be corrected except by Grace alone.

Now, a major error of Baptist and most other denominations’ dogmas regarding salvation, especially today, when the level of education and experience of the clergy is not better than a condition of sin(!!!), is their assertion that Grace to remediate sin (usually thought of wrongly as deeds) has to be accepted by the creature. Well, did you ask your children if they accepted your love before you fed and clothed, etc. them? Not hardly. In fact the reverse was the case. They could not accept your love until they had been fed and clothed, etc. by it. Their very acceptance depended on your pre-existing, enabling love — what doctrine calls prevenient Grace.

As Luther said, just the statement that one is a sinner is concrete evidence that one is in a state of Grace and therefore NOT a sinner, as the term sin means. Only one who is in a state of Grace could be aware of the possibility of estrangement from Grace, the possibility of sin, and have horror of it. Only one in Grace can fear God. This is the meaning of The beginning of wisdom [doctrine] is the fear of God. Without Grace, nothing positive is possible, only destruction. Hell is not a place. It is not a potential destiny. It is the condition of sin, of estrangement from God, of separation from Grace.

When your child says sincerely and with remorse, Daddy, I’ve done bad, do you throw them out of your house, estranging them from your love? No, you thank them for their honesty and help them not make the same mistake again. They are still in the condition of your love. They still have Faith in you and you in them. There is no rupture, no estrangement in your relationship together. Why? Because underlying all is your original love (which is, let’s face it, God’s Grace in the concrete) which reared them properly and so made their life possible and expansive even through the torrent of ambiguities they and you continue to face each minute so long as you are embodied.

I hope that helps on understanding sin. What you talk about not being proud of are errors that have caused feelings of remorse or possibly guilt. All of those can be corrected by yourself while in the condition of Grace, which you are in, because they are part of the ambiguity of existence. None of them makes you a sinner, estranged from God. This is important to understand.

AMDG