A Christian Hamartiology for a Modern Context

The hyper-individualism of modern capitalism shirks our collective responsibility—the obligation we have toward one another as siblings and neighbors in a shared, created existence—by placing the burden of responsibility on the individual rather than on the fraternity of systems by which experience itself is constructed. For example, homelessness is seen as the fault of the homeless, not as the shared fault of those who benefit from the exploitation of poverty for the accumulation of wealth. Similarly, disability is treated as the problem of the "disabled"—to be resolved through assimilation—rather than as the result of a hegemonic and disabling ableism. In other words, sin is understood as the antecedent of personal guilt, perpetrated by an individual, rather than as the moral condition of dehumanized social and moral existence, of which we are all made victims and from which we are to be liberated to repentance by divine grace. (Repentance must too be understood properly—not as a turning away from sin, but as a turning toward the kingdom of God).

A Christian can have nothing to do with this conveniently capitalistic modernist hamartiology. 

Full stop. 

There is no biblical grounding for such an isolating, atemporal, atopographical, and disembodied conceptualization of sin (nor of its corresponding anthropology, for that matter). The exposition of sin must be concrete and actual, emerging from the lived experience of human beings, from the very soil in which the tree of Golgotha is planted. There is no place in Christian theology for a doctrine of sin that is abstracted from the reality of shared experience, collective responsibility, and relational anthropology.

The burden of responsibility falls on the individual only—and this only is decisive—insofar as that individual is both the constructor of and constructed within the transversal reality of temporal, historical, embodied, collective interdependence. Sin, therefore, acts upon us before we have a chance to enact it. We are its victims before and even as we are its perpetrators. It is shame before it is guilt. We are to be accepted (Tillich) before we are to be forgiven (and we are forgiven!). When we are guilty of sin, we are guilty as those who suffer sin's incursions.

This Christian understanding of sin is grounded in the prevenience—and proper understanding—of grace itself. Grace precedes and creates repentance; it is not initiated by it. Grace is the final resolution of sin.

Therefore, sin cannot be resolved through the personal responsibility, innocence, or integrity of the individual, as though one could shield themselves from guilt or avoid sin entirely and thereby be exempt from the problem of sin. Even Jesus, who "committed" no sin, was subject to sin. "He who was without sin became sin for us." Sin is a collective reality, and in Christ, we are liberated from it only through resurrection.

Sin, then, is the condition of human alienation from God. At its root, it has nothing to do with individual responsibility and everything to do with our collective belonging to a divine commonwealth—one in which the demonic, coercive, and corrosive powers of the age have no claim and no future.

To preach sin rightly is not to inspire guilt but to name the truth of a world out of joint—a world in which we are complicit and yet not condemned, harmed and yet not abandoned. It is to proclaim that grace is not a reward for the innocent but a gift for the entangled. And only the truth of grace—never guilt—can make us free.