Curved In On Ourselves
Last week I tried to argue that, contrary to much of what we’ve been taught, sin does not separate us from God. Many of us have heard that God cannot even look on it. But if the Gospel records are true we have to say, “Of course he can! If he couldn’t, how would he save us from it?”
In Christ we meet a God who loves sinners so much that, not only does he look on their sin, but he becomes their sin in order to free them from it. Sin doesn’t have the power to separate you from God.
For many of us, that’s tough to come to terms with. And it’s especially tough because there are texts in Scripture that speak of sin causing a separation, a break, or a fracture.
If we start with Jesus, though, we can see that the separation that sin causes is not between us and God, but within ourselves. Sin separates us from ourselves. It separates us from our awareness of and sensitivity to God, our neighbors, and ourselves. Sin causes a lack of self-awareness.
In his lectures on the book of Romans Martin Luther famously defines sin as being “incurvatus in se,” or “curved in on the self.” Sin turns us in on ourselves and makes us self-absorbed.
I’m going to keep reiterating this because I think it is important for us to wrestle with: Many of us have been given doctrines of sin that are sinful. Or to put it in Luther’s language, those problematic doctrines of sin actually lead to a deeper “curving in” on our own selves. As Chris Green reminds us, “Nothing is so sinful as what we’ve said about sin.”
Sin Separates You From Yourself
The separation that sin causes can first be seen in Genesis 2 and 3.
In his lectures on Genesis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are at the center of the garden. The trees are the center of Eden, and so they are the center of Adam and Eve’s life. It is significant that in a story in which Adam and Eve are the main characters, they are not at the center.1
Bonhoeffer takes this to mean that it is God who is the center of Adam and Eve’s life. The tree of life is an image representing God. God is life. He is my life and your life. You and I do not have life in and of ourselves. Apart from God no one has life. In him we live and move and have our being. Adam and Eve are not their own center. God is their center.
So, in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve enter the center of the garden to take from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they are attempting to make themselves the center of their own lives. They are becoming “gods against God.” They desire to know good and evil from themselves—with themselves as the center.
In this act of attempting to find their origin in themselves, they are becoming “curved in on themselves” as Luther says. Not curved toward God and neighbor, but self-absorbed. This is surely what God means when he says, “If you eat of the tree you shall surely die.” To live with yourself at the center of your life is to become deadened to your true life which is only in God. It is to create a false life on a false center.
Here’s Bonhoeffer expounding on this in Ethics:
“Man at his origin knows only one thing: God…He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with his origin…The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God.”2
Bonhoeffer speaks of separation here. But it is about Adam and Eve’s knowledge. It’s not that Adam and Eve have successfully cut themselves off from God. They don’t have the ability to do that. They can’t dictate who God is to them and who they are to God. But they can cut themselves off from their awareness and knowledge of their true center.
Bonhoeffer continues:
“But man cannot be rid of his origins…Man’s life is now in disunion with God, with men, with things, and with himself.”3
To have yourself as your own center and origin, to live from yourself, to know good and evil from yourself, is another word for the conscience. The conscience is that faculty that adjudicates the rightness and wrongness of what you do. But based on what? Your own perception of good and evil. You are the center and the origin.
The reason Adam and Eve are in disunion with God is because they are in disunion with themselves! They’ve “created” false selves. They’ve alienated themselves not from God, but from their true selves. Their false selves are alienated from God. But why? Because they are an unreality. Those lives are lies.
Bonhoeffer’s argues that when Adam and Eve take of the fruit, the conscience is born. Before the fall Adam and Eve have no conscience. They know only God as their center and so they don’t have to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. But when they make themselves their own origin, they make their own knowledge of good and evil their center. Their conscience becomes their new God (Sicut deus—Like God, gods against God). The good and evil that Adam and Eve now know are not the good and evil God knows, but the good and evil of their own choosing. Conscience is the problem the fall creates. And it’s a fracture within Adam and Eve.
Bonhoeffer is strong on this point:
“Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men. It is therefore from his right relation to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men.”4
This is why the letter to the Hebrews says Jesus’s sacrifice is different than all the other sacrifices that have come before: Jesus’s sacrifice cleanses the conscience of the worshiper (Hebrews 9:9, 14).
Think of how different that sounds from what we’ve often been taught. Many of us will have learned that Jesus has to die in order to set things right between us and the Father. We’ve been taught that the problem is between us and God, and Jesus’s death puts that right. But that’s not what Scripture says. Hebrews says that Jesus’s sacrifice changes us, not God. He cleanses our conscience, our perception, our awareness.
The separation that sin causes is a break within ourselves. We don’t perceive the world (and God) rightly precisely because we do not see ourselves rightly.
In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus talks about the eye being the lamp of the body. He’s talking about our perception. He says the light that is in you is darkness. Your perception is off. You and I think we know what good and evil are, but we are living by our own light—which is darkness.
(Don’t forget that John 1 tells us that Jesus is the light of every human. He is our light. He doesn’t become our light when we decide to let him be out light. That’s who he is. When we come to see him as our true light we are recognizing the truth about ourselves. In that process, we are becoming true, not making Jesus true. We live in a delusion (sin) that makes us think we have our own light, but it is darkness.)
This is the hope of the gospel: Christ has come to cleanse the conscience! Or to put it another way, Christ comes to reveal to us that our own conscience is not our true center—he is, and always has been! But we need that to be revealed to us. We need to be changed.
The work of Christ is overcoming the separation that is in us. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection do not change God—it changes us!
To say sin separates us from God is to say that God changes in his relation to us. But we know that can’t be the case. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever! We are the ones who change and need changing. God never once leaves us. As St. Irenaeus says, Adam never once escapes the hand of God throughout his life, especially when he is in sin.
To sum up: the conscience—according to Bonhoeffer riffing on Luther—is what curves us in on ourselves. It is the seat of sin. The conscience is what needs to be overcome.
In one of his lecture notes to the underground seminary at Finkenwalde Bonhoeffer puts it like this:
“Whoever is one, whole, unbroken, has no conscience. Those in the middle, between good and evil, have a conscience...Having a conscience means that a person is between good and evil. To every person conscience says: you did something bad, only because I know about good... As long as we have conscience, we cannot be as good as Jesus wants us to be. The goodness of conscience is something different from the goodness of Christ...Ultimately our conscience must die so that Christ alone may live within us. Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer."5
Or more simply, as he says in elsewhere, “Christ must become our conscience.” Christ is our true center and we must come to recognize it.
The truth of the entire world is that it has been reconciled to Christ—whether it recognizes it or not. He is the true center of all things.6 Any “world” that is not centered on Christ is not the true world. Any person who is not centered on Christ is living in their own false reality—their own delusion. But this is the point: it isn’t reality! Human beings in their true reality are those who are “accepted in the incarnation of Christ… loved, condemned and reconciled in Christ.”7
Or as another Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson, provocatively puts it: “Sin is simply man’s attempt to behave as if he were not reconciled to God through Christ.”8
Anyone who lives in sin is not living into the truth of who they have been made to be in Christ. They are living in a delusion.
But that delusion is not a separation from God. It is a self-delusion. God is right there with every person in their delusion. The incarnation reveals to us just how far God is willing to descend: God even comes inside our own delusions. There is nowhere that we can escape from him.
Sin does have a “disorienting and deadening effect” on us. And, “as that damage is done, we begin to lose touch with ourselves… We are less and less capable of being straight and open with God.”9
But God is never incapable of being straight and open with us. He is waiting for us where he always has been—in his Son Jesus Christ. He has never separated himself from us, but has always been present to us in our own separation from ourselves. Where is God? God is in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the place in which the world has been made one with God. And that is the truth about you and me and everyone we have ever met.
Self-Absorption vs. Self-Awareness
Sin curves us in on ourselves, but most of what we’ve heard about sin makes us more curved in on ourselves. As Chris Green points out, we are typically more concerned with managing our feelings of guilt than with the harm we’ve actually done to our neighbors.10 That’s the work of the conscience. As Bonhoeffer insists, the conscience keeps us from knowing God and our neighbors rightly because it keeps us from knowing ourselves rightly. (see 1 Cor. 4:4 and 1 John 3:20). The conscience keeps us self-absorbed, but Jesus brings us into self-awareness. The difference is crucial.
So much of the preaching and teaching that we’ve received aims at our conscience, our feelings of guilt, and motivates us to do whatever is necessary to alleviate our feelings of guilt, rather than making right the wrong we’ve done to our neighbors.
Focusing on our own feelings of guilt is not a move towards self-awareness but being driven further into self-absorption. Self-awareness is the ability to step into a room and know where you are and how you fit in that particular place. It’s knowing where you end and others begin. Self-absorption has no grasp of this. Someone who is self-absorbed can’t see their own edges, their own limits and boundaries. They are curved in on themselves.
We’ve all met people who are caricatures of self-absorption (remember, this is a problem of degree not kind). These people think they are the main character in every room they walk into. As self-absorption increases, self-awareness decreases.
Self-awareness can only happen as your conscience dies and Christ comes alive in you. “Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer.”
Coming to see Christ as your true center overcomes the separation that sin causes within us. We don’t know ourselves truly until we know ourselves “in Christ.” True self-awareness can never happen apart from the presence of Jesus.
What grieves me is that so much of our preaching and teaching about sin usually throws people back on themselves and creates even more separation within them. It plays to their conscience and increases self-absorption. What our souls desperately need is preaching and teaching that direct us outside of ourselves to Christ.
This was right at the heart of the theology of Martin Luther. The gospel is a word that comes to us from outside of ourselves, not from within. Philip Cary summarizes Luther like this:
“Luther never looks inside himself to find Christ. It is precisely by taking hold of Christ outside us, in the external word of the Gospel, that faith brings Christ into our heart… If you want to learn a song by heart, you don’t listen to your heart but to the song, as the sound of it reverberates in the air and in your ears… Likewise, if you want to be united with Christ, Luther thinks, you must listen to the Gospel as it comes to you from outside, through your ears and into your heart. When you receive this word by faith, the form of Christ becomes your own, like the music of your heart.”11
All of this is right. The gospel is an external word, not an internal word.12 But we need to say more. Although it is true that the gospel is a word that is external to us, we actually find our true center there. It turns out to be the very center of our being. It comes to us on the periphery of the false selves we’ve created, but it invites us to abandon those false selves with their false realities, and to find our center at the cross of Christ.
When the gospel comes to us, it does draw us out of our delusions, but it does not annihilate us. It makes us who we have always been called to be. It makes us true by giving us our true center—Jesus Christ.
Or to put it in the language we’ve been using: the word of the gospel calls us out from the separation sin has caused within us. It calls us out of our self-delusions, out of our false selves, and back home to our truth.
The voice that speaks the truth to us is not our own conscience, but the voice of that strange Galilean man who claimed to be the truth. That voice is the voice that called you into being, after all. And it still is.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, p. 80—93.
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 21, (Touchstone edition).
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 22, 24 (emphasis added).
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 28 (emphasis added).
Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde, DBW, vol. 14, p. 380.
I think this is precisely what Paul means when in Colossians 3:11 he says that “Christ is all and is in all.”
Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 201, 218.
Robert Jenson, Alpha and Omega, p. 37.
Phillip Cary, The Meaning of Protestant Theology, p. 192-193.
Just for fun: Compare this way of thinking to the theology of the Reformed scholastics (that paved the way to Protestant liberalism) on the relationship between the conscience and the word of God. Karl Barth puts it like this: “According to the work of W. Ames, which was authoritative for contemporary Reformed theology, ‘conscience’ has to be understood as the judicial opinion of man, considered as [a natural virtue], about his own status on the judgment of God—a [virtue] in which man is in direct touch with God” (CD II.2, p. 320). Luther and Bonhoeffer couldn’t disagree more. Conscience does not put you in direct touch with God, it pretends to be the voice of God.
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