The Slavery of Death: Part 5, The Dynamics of Sin and Death

Going forward I want to get this sketch out there so we can visualize how I'm understanding the relationships between the Fall, death, sarx, and sin:





Though we haven't gotten to it yet, the "Fall" starts the cycle off separating us from God, the Source of Life. The result of this separation is death and the mortal condition. This situation kicks off a reinforcing loop, a self-perpetuating cycle that "traps" us. Death creates mortality fears that put acute pressure on sarx, our biological contingency. Fearful and anxious to stave off death we move into sinful practices. Envy, greed, selfishness, paranoia, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, rivalry, and violence. We might call this the Malthusian, Hobbesian or Girardian condition based upon the work of Thomas Malthus, Thomas Hobbes and Rene Girard. Here's how Mark Lilla describes of the Hobbesian/Malthusian/Girardian situation in his book The Stillborn God (p. 81,82):

Natural man, according to Hobbes, is desiring man--which also means he is fearful man. If he finds himself alone in nature we will try to satisfy his desires, will only partially succeed, and will fear losing what he has. But if other human beings are present that fear will be heightened to an almost unbearable degree. Given his awareness of himself as a creature beset by desire--a stream of desire that ends, says Hobbes, only in death--he assumes others are similarly driven. "Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth," Hobbes writes, "he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts and passions of all other men." That means he can think of them only as potential competitors, trying to satisfy desires that may come into conflict with his own.

...

That is why the natural social condition of mankind is war--if not explicit, armed hostilities, then a perpetual state of anxious readiness in preparation for conflict. Even the Bible recognizes this tendency. Hobbes asserts: Cain killed his brother not because of an explicit threat but because he feared losing what he had and was ignorant of God's reasons for favoring Abel. Fear, ignorance, and desire are the basic motivations of all human activity, political and religious. One does not have to assume man is fallen, or evil, or possessed by demons to explain why those motivations produce war. One need only understand how these basic motivations combine in the human mind, both when man is alone and when he is in society.

Here's how the theologian S. Mark Heim describes the dynamics above, starting with the separation from God in the Fall:

Removed from Eden we are "[u]nourished by the divine energy, our existence fades into subjection to corruption and death. In such a state, our mortality becomes a source of anxiety. Futile attempts to defend ourselves from it lead us into active sin and estrange us from trust in God. Now sinfulness is more a result of mortality than mortality from sinfulness. To say that humans are 'conceived in sin' does not mean that some guilt or evil inclination is passed on to them in the act of their conception, but that what they inherit is a mortal human nature, which became mortal as a result of sin.

So, given human biodegradability, the fear of death moves us into sin. And this sin keeps us separated from God keeping us stuck in death. And the cycle repeats itself.



This is what I mean by "the slavery of death." Hence Paul's cry in Romans 7:

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?