In the current Hebrew month of repentance, it’s hard not to notice that we live in a culture that takes sin far less seriously than it used to. The formula “mistakes were made” has largely replaced the admission of personal responsibility; apologies are routinely qualified by the words “if anyone was offended”; and even murder is explained away by abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex of the perpetrator. So it is hard to recapture the sense of sin as a metaphysical reality that must be expiated—an element of the Judeo-Christian worldview that the Western world took for granted until the day before yesterday.
But just as sin seems to be fading as an actual problem for contemporary man, it is generating significant academic interest. In his 2010 book Sin: A History, Gary A. Anderson sought to demonstrate a shift in the concept of sin within the Bible itself, from the early metaphor of sin as a burden that had to be lifted, as symbolized by the scapegoat, to sin as a generator of spiritual “debt,” which established the cultural centrality of charity in both rabbinic and Christian teachings.
Read Full Article »