Reaching for Liberation – Part 4 “So What about Sin?”

This is the fourth of six posts in which I draw on an article by liberation theologian, Ignacio Ellacuria, to reflect on and seek to re-frame the connected themes of sin, Jesus' death, and salvation.

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Another area that Ellacuria helps reframe is the understanding of sin. Traditionally veiwed as a universal human malaise, sin has also been understood primarily in individual, personal terms. Passed on from generation to generation ever since Adam and Eve's original sin, it is understood that every human person is sinful by nature and, arising from this sinful nature, are the inevitable immoral and sinful acts that characterize every human life. From this perspective the consequences of sin - death and separation from God – are understood at the individual and personal level and so also, similarly, the understanding and benefits of salvation.¹

By contrast and in keeping with a broader theological development within liberation theology, Ellacuria emphasizes instead the structural character of sin. This approach, while acknowledging the human experience of brokenness, sees the impact and responsibility of this brokenness less at the individual level and more on the collective plane. And so, for example, the human propensity of greed for power ends up expressing itself in nations going to war. Or as another example, the human insecurity that is greed for material and financial wealth results in the legislation of laws enabling the exploitation of workers or even the condoning of slavery; or on a different key it leads to the exploitation of the earth's natural resources to the disregard for the impact this will have on other species and on the generations of our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

And so, although not denying the reality of individual or personal moral failures, the approach taken by Ellacuria places emphasis on human brokenness at large, the ways it ends up being embodied in the very structures of society. And it emphasizes the negative impact, the injustice, this sinful character at the structural level creates in the lives of individuals, communities and of whole societies.

The town where I live is economically and, to some extent still, racially segregated. Historically there were town laws which prevented African Americans from buying homes in the “white part of town" and whites were discouraged from living in the “black part of town" – and no one did. Legislated city boundaries meant that much of the “black part of town” lay outside the city limits and so received no

The landfill was built at the edge of the "black part of town."

city services like water, sewer, garbage pick-up, etc. Schools in the “black part of town" were significantly under-funded, in contrast to the schools located in the “white part of town”. Some years back the county negotiated the creation of a large landfill at the edge of the “black part of town”. Poor families in the vicinity were lured into supporting this plan with the promise of receiving a few thousand dollars each. Of course the creation of the landfill meant that property values in the “black part of town” plummeted. Once the landfill became operational, local water supplies, which still in large part were drawn from wells, became contaminated. And, although families had been promised that there would be signficant benefits and no negative impacts from the landfill, it was the local poor families and their children who had to put up with the toxic stench on hot, windless Florida days. These are examples of sinfulness, the reality of human evil and brokennes, embeded and expressed structurally in the political, economic, and social realities of a local community.

The flip side of this coin is that when there is resistance to the impact of unjust structures, those in positions of power and who benefit from the structural set-up use the power available to them to crush the resistance. And so, as we have witnessed in the news over the last few months, when the folks in Ferguson, Missouri came out to peacefully and legally protest a culture of racial profiling and oppression by local authorities, they were confronted with tear gas and military-style (war-making) machinery and weapons. Sinful structures, once entrenched, use all the might available to them to block change!

In the extreme case, unjust structures are defended at the price of human life. Because of their active opposition to the violent oppression being carried out against rural poor communities by government forces in El Salvador (supported, by the way, by U.S. funding and training), on November 16, 1989 Ignacio Ellacuria, the other Jesuits in his community, along with their house-keeper and her dautgher were savagely murdered. Another example is Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned and on April 9, 1945 was executed by hanging for his efforts against Hitler and Nazism. Yes, when unjust power structures are challenged or threatened, they are capable of going to any extreme to protect the status quo.

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In the next post we will look at the question of the Jesus' death and how his (and all death) is related to sin.

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1  For greater elaboration on this traditional view see the second post in this series. http://spiritandpraxis.blogspot.com/2015/02/reaching-for-liberation-part-2-sin.html