Framing God's Story: More About Human Weakness, Less About Human Wickedness

Continuing the theme of last week's post (The Picture Frame Makes a Difference), I want to share more about how some others in Christianity frame the human predicament differently than we western Christians generally frame it.

In his book, The Slavery of Death, Richard Beck says: "Where Western Christianity has tended to interpret 'sarx' as a depraved and congenital 'sin nature,' the Orthodox see 'sarx' as 'mortality' - our corruptibility and perishability in the face of death. And it's this vulnerability, Paul explains, that makes us susceptible to sin. The idea here is that we are less 'wicked' than we are 'weak.' As 'sarx' - mortal animals - we are playthings of the devil, who uses the fear of death to push and pull our survival instincts (our fleshly, sarx-driven passions) to keep us as 'slaves to sin.'...Sin here is seen as a symptom of death, the underlying disease.

"...our vulnerability to death makes us fearful, paranoid, and suspicious creatures and...these fears promote a host of moral and social ills...Because we are mortal and driven by self-preservation, our survival instincts make us tragically vulnerable to death anxiety - the desire to preserve our own existence above all else and at all costs."

According to Hebrews 2, Satan uses this fear of death to hold us captive to resorting to our own devices for survival rather than trusting God, and this sin of independence in turn brings separation from God, and so the tragic cycle goes on. In this particular framing of the story, salvation is from death and corruptibility and its cycle, whereas in the western framing of the story, salvation is from divine wrath.

Framing humans in God's story as weak rather than as wicked presents a different view of God and of humans; as I suggested in last week's post (here), it can significantly change our attitude towards others (and towards ourselves) and empower us to see all humans with compassion rather than with judgment.