Answer:
For several decades voices from various sectors of Christianity have decried the
loss of compelling language for sin. The atrophying of sin language is of no small
moment due to the organic connection between theological loci. Sin talk relates to
salvation-talk, human-talk, and Christ-talk. Further, the loss of compelling sin language
threatens to silence the church’s voice in the culture.
Both classic and contemporary theologies of sin, pursuing the essentialist methods
of the past, attempt to define sin and derive the fullness of the doctrine of sin from these
distillations. However, many of these renderings of sin are insufficiently attentive to the
importance of narrative modes of thought in theologizing. Specifically, they often almost
completely ignore the witness of the biblical narrative—both individual narratives and
the Bible’s overall narrative structure. Furthermore, they tend to appropriate the
narratives, and especially the narrative of the fall in Genesis 3, in ways that actually
subvert the narratives’ narrativity through historicizing, mythologizing, and
decontextualizing. They therefore provide thin descriptions of the human condition and
consequently offer distorted depictions of redemption, humanity, and the divine-human
relationship. These patterns can be seen in both feminist theologies that build their
definitions of sin from particular views of the human and evangelical theology which
derive their definition from biblical propositions.
In this dissertation we seek to begin to offer a narrative theology of sin by
providing a reading of Genesis 1-11 that attends to its literary character and seeks to
identify the reference point for sin and discern its development in the narrative. We will
discover that both the reference point for sin and the axis of its development relates to the
depiction of the human as the imago dei.
We will conclude by demonstrating that indexing the doctrine of sin to a
narratively construed imago dei offers a more robust language for sin and in particular,
offers a more natural bridge to Christ. Indeed, in the story of redemption, Christ becomes
the ultimate reference point for describing sin.
Explanation:
