Sinful Thoughts, 1.1: A Dehumanizing System

I attended a Christian College (save one glorious semester at Clark State University). The education that I received was great. However, there was a subculture that I still find rather interesting. It was a culture of rules.

Not just a rule about where to park or a rule about where smoking is not permitted. I mean rules about dress code, rules about what music you could not listen to (I love Sandi Patty), rules about not kissing your girlfriend, rules about what time you needed to be in bed, and rules about how to obey the rules, and rules about pretty much anything. The student handbook was nearly as big as the enormous dictionary that sat on the podium in the front of our library.

I bring up all of these rules that we “agreed” to live under for a specific reason. It seems these rules are there to empower the school administration, faculty, resident directors, and students to manage sin well. Rules like this, anywhere they are found, allow sin to become a simple cut made with surgical precision.

When there are hundreds of arbitrary rules in place, sin becomes simple. If you break a rule, you sin. There is a boundary line and when you step over it you are guilty. It’s quite easy. This is what rules do, they make things easy for us.

We know when we’ve sinned. We then confess that we have sinned. Then we apologize for the sin. We ask forgiveness for the sin. Then we repeat the cycle.

This way of thinking and living, however, moves sin out of the sphere of relationships and into the world of transactions. Relationships are messy. Transactions are clean.

By reducing sin to a set of institutional preferences that are supposed to be kept by a group of students, we introduce ourselves to a world in which we as people are isolated and individualistic. Knowing these kinds of "systematic sin" worlds well, it does not take much before these rules creep into God's realm. Suddenly, God is a God of institutional preferences who plays by the same rulebook you do. In this, I saw many who traded in a relational God for an institutional God.

Our sin then is against a system or an institution. The offense is against a faceless entity, not against another person, or against God himself. There is not relational rupture at all, precisely because there is no relationship. It is a student and a system.

Perhaps we create all of these rules not because we are strict, legalistic, or because we do not want students drinking beer at a roadside park on the night they return from Christmas break during their senior year. Perhaps, subconsciously, we make these rules because it just makes things easier for us. It reduces pain, it reduces difficulty, and it creates an efficient way of dealing with sin.

While a system of rules may serve to make dealing with sin efficient; it also makes us less human. As women and men created in the image of God we are relational beings. As soon as we cut relationships out of our lives - even out of our sin - we diminish ourselves, and a system of rules can do just that.

For so many of us we live within these well-defined boundaries of rules, because it gives us comfort. Yet in the end it makes us less human, for our sin is reduced to a simple breaking of the rules. Our sin is removed from any relational connection. In this kind of system then, moving past sin is just a simple plan of behavior modification.

These systems do not work. They are as broken now as they ever have been. Sin is a destructive tear in the fabric of relationships. To pretend as though it is a simple cut is to make us all less human.

So let’s put our humanity back in our sinfulness. Let’s abandon the systems of belonging and acceptance that have dehumanized us for so long.