Not My Problem (1) Rewind

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God  Romans 3:23  NASB

Fall short – Just how far do you think you’ll get with modern men and women by telling them that they are sinners?  Can I suggest that unless you are speaking to people who have some sort of connection with the Church or the Bible, your words will fall on deaf ears?  And now we know that even if they are Church-going, Bible-believing people, they probably have no idea what the real meaning of sin is.  Nevertheless, sin is not modern man’s problem.  Modern man’s problem is summed up by Nietzsche: “Woe unto him who has no home!”  Modern man’s problem is that he is homeless in the universe.  Since the Enlightenment, he has discovered with intensifying clarity that he doesn’t fit in.  Pascal, who offered the famous wager of faith, actually contributed to the modern angst when he suggested that Man is thrown into “the overawing infinity of cosmic spaces and times,”^[1] and recognizes his total insignificance in an indifferent universe.  Man’s problem is silence!  The universe no longer speaks to him.  He has rejected the voice of God through the prophets. This leaves him utterly alone in “an immense and blind universe in which his existence is but a particular blind accident.”^[2] With the collapse of the Greek idea of cosmos^[3] and the loss of the Hebrew idea of a Creator,

he shares no longer in a meaning of nature, but merely, through his body, in its mechanical determination, so nature no longer shares in his inner concerns.  Thus that by which man is superior to all nature, his unique distinction, mind, no longer results in a higher integration of his being into the totality of being, but on the contrary marks the unbridgeable gulf between himself and the rest of existence.  Estranged from the community of being in one whole, his consciousness only makes him a foreigner in the world . . .^[4]

This is the human condition.  Gone is the cosmos with whose immanent logos my own can feel kinship, gone the order of the whole in which man has his place.  That place appears now as a sheer and brute accident . . . a universe without an intrinsic hierarchy of being, as the Copernican universe is, leaves values ontologically unsupported, and the self is thrown back entirely upon itself in its quest for meaning and value.  Meaning is no longer found but is “conferred.”^[5]

In other words, you and I make our own world because we are completely cast adrift from any meaningful world outside of us.  Anarchy in the heavens means death to the human spirit, but rather than commit suicide, we grant ourselves the right to determine what matters.  If we summarize this academic analysis, we discover something incredibly important.  Modern man does not stand on Mars Hill.  He has painted himself back into the Garden.  Once more he is challenged to either acknowledge that the creation is God’s or he is tempted to create his own universe.  Modern man has opted for the latter.  The result is expulsion—not just from the Garden but from all creation.

The religious community has a tendency to read only the first part of Paul’s statement.  “All have sinned,” is all we need when the world is fundamentally religious.  But the world isn’t religious anymore.  At least it isn’t religious for men who occupy the space derived from 18^th Century Western thought.  Maybe we’ve forgotten what has happened to men who are lost in the world.  We still think they need to repent.  But the world has changed, and so has the emphasis in Paul’s statement.  Sin isn’t the issue.  Glory is.

Modern man has been stripped of glory.  It’s not that he has simply fallen short.  Modern man has been emasculated, castrated by the universe that used to provide him with some sense of purpose and meaning.  Modern man has no significance.  What he does doesn’t matter.  It’s all swept away by cosmic determinism, the inexorable grinding of natural laws and random chance.  Modern man is not worried about being judged for his sin.  He is worried about living for no reason at all.

Heschel noted that religion must begin with awe.  Paul says pretty much the same thing (Romans 1:19-20).  Unless the universe inspires, healing is not possible.  Maybe we haven’t understood how important glory is to the equation.  Perhaps we should adjust Paul’s verse:  “All modern men have fallen short of God’s glory, and sinned.”

Topical Index:  fallen short, glory, cosmos, universe, sin, Romans 3:23

[1] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 322.

[2] “ . . . more than the overawing infinity of cosmic spaces and times, more than the quantitative disproportion, the insignificance of man as a magnitude in this vastness, it is the ‘silence’ that is, the indifference of this universe to human aspirations—the not knowing of things human on the part of that within which all things human have preposterously to be enacted—which constitutes the utter loneliness of man in the sum of things.  As part of this sum, as an instance of nature, man is only a reed, liable to be crushed at any moment, by the forces of an immense and blind universe in which his existence is but a particular blind accident . . .” Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 322.

[3] You will recall that cosmos means much more than “universe.” “By a long tradition this term had to the Greek mind become invested with the highest religious dignity.  The very word by its literal meaning expresses a positive evaluation of the object—any object—to which it is accorded as a descriptive term.  For cosmos means ‘order’ in general, whether of the world or a household, of a commonwealth of a life: it is a term of praise and even admiration.  Thus when applied to the universe and becoming assigned to it as to its eminent instance, the word does not merely signify the neutral but expresses a specific and to the Greek mind an ennobling quality of this whole: that it is order.”  Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 241.

[4] Jonas,  op. cit., p. 323.

[5] Ibid.