{"id":10241,"date":"2016-08-18T18:02:47","date_gmt":"2016-08-19T01:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/cosmostheinlost\/?p=10241"},"modified":"2016-08-24T21:40:39","modified_gmt":"2016-08-25T04:40:39","slug":"top10-books-for-explaining-original-sin-to-interested-nonbelievers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/cosmostheinlost\/2016\/08\/18\/top10-books-for-explaining-original-sin-to-interested-nonbelievers\/","title":{"rendered":"TOP10 Books for Explaining Original Sin to Interested Nonbelievers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"(Hans
(Hans Holbein, Adam and Eve, 1517; Wikimedia, PD-Old-100)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

I am merely trying to say that there is a cultural danger inherent in any utopia of perfect reconciliation and\u2013what is another facet of the same problems\u2013that the concept of original sin gives us a penetrating insight into human destiny.
\n\u2013Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In order to show what the doctrine of original sin might mean, it is necessary to return to first principles and examine the apostolic witness to try to identify the roots of what was later to develop into a formal doctrine. It goes without saying that the formal doctrine is not to be found explicitly set forth in the apostolic witness, any more than is the doctrine of the Trinity. Part of my contention indeed will be that the development of these two doctrines are not only legitimate as a proper working out of the shape of salvation produced by the death and resurrection of Jesus, but that they are, in some sense, parallel, and mutually dependent out-workings of the presence of that salvation in the midst of humanity.
\n\u2013James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Problems of sin, death, and the devil don\u2019t seem to be relevant to a supposedly secular age.<\/p>\n

Yet, the response to atheist philosopher, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek (one of my TOP10 atheists who treat religion charitably<\/a>), using hell-language to deconstruct the Clinton Consensus<\/a> seems to say otherwise. This age old doctrine of Original Sin has an explanatory power for\u00a0grasping the continuing crimes and peccadilloes of humanity that is uncanny.<\/p>\n

But how does one come to understand the human propensity toward sin? How does one explain it to contemporaries who would like to understand its origins and significance? This is a question\u00a0a believer friend of mine posed to me in place of an atheist friend who is interested in investigating it more.<\/p>\n

My answer is the usual idiosyncratic TOP10 list of books<\/a>. The list of theology, philosophy, poetry, and fiction books does not appear to be systematic at first glance. This is intentional. I would like to give the reader as many looks at the phenomenon, from as many different angles as possible, to the not entirely familiar, although curious reader.<\/p>\n

These selections also trend toward contemporary sources, not because I aim to denigrate the past, but because I believe they are the best gateways to ancient sources, which are written in unfamiliar idioms. They are training for further reading.<\/p>\n

As always, I welcome your suggestions in the comments section at the end of the post, and I welcome you to look at my other TOP10 booklists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

PRELUDE:<\/p>\n

\"61Y4wiWbWOL__SX331_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>The Lost World of Adam and Eve<\/em><\/a>, John H. Walton<\/p>\n

2016 Christianity Today<\/em> Biblical Studies Award of Merit For centuries the story of Adam and Eve has resonated richly through the corridors of art, literature and theology. But for most moderns, taking it at face value is incongruous. And even for many thinking Christians today who want to take seriously the authority of Scripture, insisting on a \u201cliteral\u201d understanding of Genesis 2\u20133 looks painfully like a \u201ctear here\u201d strip between faith and science. How can Christians of good faith move forward? Who were the historical Adam and Eve? What if we\u2019ve been reading Genesis\u2015and its claims regarding material origins\u2015wrong? In what cultural context was this couple, this garden, this tree, this serpent portrayed? Following his groundbreaking Lost World of Genesis One<\/em>, John Walton explores the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis 2\u20133, creating space for a faithful reading of Scripture along with full engagement with science for a new way forward in the human origins debate. As a bonus, an illuminating excursus by N.\u00a0T. Wright places Adam in the implied narrative of Paul\u2019s theology. The Lost World of Adam and Eve<\/em> will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand this foundational text historically and theologically, and wondering how to view it alongside contemporary understandings of human origins.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"41vYbrWUU8L__SX313_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>The Symbolism of Evil<\/a><\/em>, Paul Ricoeur<\/p>\n

According to Ricoeur, the most primal and spontaneous symbols of evil are defilement, sin and guilt \u2026 Ricoeur moves from the elementary symbols of evil into the rich world of myths \u2026 and he ends by suggesting that the clue to the relation between philosophy to mythology is to be found in the aphorism \u2018The symbol gives rise to the thought\u2019 \u2026 Ricoeur\u2019s method and argument are too intricate and rich to assess in so short a review. Suffice it to say that this is the most massive accomplisment of any philosopher within the ambience of Christian faith\u00a0since the appearance of Gabriel Marcel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Original Peace<\/a><\/em>, \"512WSNV496L__SX333_BO1,204,203,200_\"David Burrell<\/p>\n

Original Peace is a work of philosophical theology that places Christ at the meeting place between humans and their natural world. In doing so the authors have given new credence to what is traditionally called \u201cfall-and-redemption theology\u201d, thereby taking exception to the works of some theorists who deny the importance of original sin.This is a profound meditation on the myth of human perfectibility, the mistaken belief that there is no dark side to nature. The authors do not return to simplistic notions about original sin and human suffering, but have forged a new synthesis based on their reading of world religions, Christian scripture and contemporary social sciences. They support the belief that creation in all its manifestations is a gift to be embraced, that even death fades to nothing against the cosmic horizon of God\u2019s creation.\u2013 a seminal work that will help shape the discussion about human nature and the natural world of many years to come<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\"51DKRS5NMVL__SX317_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>Religion: If There is No God\u2026on God, the Devil, Sin and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religion<\/a><\/em>, Leszek Kolakowski<\/p>\n

Leszek Kolakowski discusses, in a highly original way, the arguments for and against the existence of God as they have been conducted through the ages. He examines the critiques of religious belief, from the Epicureans through Nietzsche to contemporary anthropological inquiry, the assumptions that underlie them, and the counter-arguments of such apologists as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal.<\/p>\n

His exploration of the philosophy of religion covers the historical discussions of the nature and existence of evil, the importance of the concepts of failure and eternity to the religious impulse, the relationship between skepticism and mysticism, and the place of reason, understanding, and in models of religious thought. He examines why people, throughout known history, have cherished the idea of eternity and existence after death, and why this hope has been dependent on the worship of an eternal reality. He confronts the problems of meaning in religious language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"51pbZrWl46L__SX317_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>Philosophical Myths of the Fall<\/a><\/em>, Stephen Mulhall<\/p>\n

Did post-Enlightenment philosophers reject the idea of original sin and hence the view that life is a quest for redemption from it? In Philosophical Myths of the Fall<\/i><\/a>, Stephen Mulhall identifies and evaluates a surprising ethical-religious dimension in the work of three highly influential philosophers\u2013Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. He asks: Is the Christian idea of humanity as structurally flawed something that these three thinkers aim simply to criticize? Or do they, rather, end up by reproducing secular variants of the same mythology?<\/p>\n

Mulhall argues that each, in different ways, develops a conception of human beings as in need of redemption: in their work, we appear to be not so much capable of or prone to error and fantasy, but instead structurally perverse, living in untruth. In this respect, their work is more closely aligned to the Christian perspective than to the mainstream of the Enlightenment. However, all three thinkers explicitly reject any religious understanding of human perversity; indeed, they regard the very understanding of human beings as originally sinful as central to that from which we must be redeemed. And yet each also reproduces central elements of that understanding in his own thinking; each recounts his own myth of our Fall, and holds out his own image of redemption. The book concludes by asking whether this indebtedness to religion brings these philosophers\u2019 thinking closer to, or instead forces it further away from, the truth of the human condition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"514hXvQn90L__SX346_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>The Sin of Knowledge<\/em><\/a>, Theodore Ziolkowski<\/p>\n

Adam, Prometheus, and Faust\u2013their stories were central to the formation of Western consciousness and continue to be timely cautionary tales in an age driven by information and technology. Here Theodore Ziolkowski explores how each myth represents a response on the part of ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, and sixteenth-century Christian culture to the problem of knowledge, particularly humankind\u2019s powerful, perennial, and sometimes unethical desire for it. This book exposes for the first time the similarities underlying these myths as well as their origins in earlier trickster legends, and considers when and why they emerged in their respective societies. It then examines the variations through which the themes have been adapted by modern writers to express their own awareness of the sin of knowledge.<\/p>\n

Each myth is shown to capture the anxiety of a society when faced with new knowledge that challenges traditional values. Ziolkowski\u2019s examples of recent appropriations of the myths are especially provocative. From Voltaire to the present, the Fall of Adam has provided an image for the emergence from childhood innocence into the consciousness of maturity. Prometheus, as the challenger of authority and the initiator of technological evil, yielded an ambivalent model for the socialist imagination of the German Democratic Republic. And finally, an America unsettled by its responsibility for the atomic bomb, and worrying that in its postwar prosperity it had betrayed its values, recognized in Faust the disturbing image of its soul.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"41DOEhnmr4L__SX331_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>The Augustinian Theology of W.H. Auden<\/em><\/a>, Stephen Schuler<\/p>\n

When W. H. Auden returned to Christianity in the early 1940s, he identified himself with what he called an \u201cexistential\u201d method of spiritual and literary inquiry, which the writings of St. Augustine helped him define as a mode of thinking that not only allows for human subjectivity, but emphasizes the hopes, fears, needs, desires, and anxieties of the individual. Augustine thus became for Auden a model of a thinker who seamlessly merged psychological reflection with philosophical speculation and theological insight, and it is this combination of introspection and theoretical investigation that shapes much of Auden\u2019s later poetry.<\/p>\n

The Augustinian Theology of W. H. Auden illustrates that Augustine\u2019s thought is a major influence on Auden\u2019s postconversion poetry and prose. Auden encountered Augustine both directly, through his reading of the Confessions, and indirectly, through several of Auden\u2019s contemporaries, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Norris Cochrane, and Charles Williams. Stephen J. Schuler argues that Augustine provided Auden with the language of privation to describe the nature of moral and social evil, enabling him to make sense of the pervasive anxieties produced by World War II. Augustine\u2019s works also offered Auden a rationale for his intuition that the physical world, and especially the human body, is intrinsically good. Auden\u2019s struggle to reconcile the implications of his Augustinian theology with his attitudes toward romantic love and sexuality are explained by Schuler, who demonstrates how the Augustinian theology of Reinhold Niebuhr helped shape Auden\u2019s ideas about human identity and community, which is defined and maintained by love in all its various forms. Finally, Schuler analyses Auden\u2019s Augustinian view of the ethics of poetry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\"9780810108394-us\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lucifer Unemployed<\/em><\/a>, Aleksander Wat<\/p>\n

In these nine stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms and the gently mocking humor of despair. Wat inverts the conventions of religion, politics, and culture to fantastic effect, illuminating the anarchic conditions of existence in interwar Europe.<\/p>\n

The title story finds a superbly ironic Lucifer wandering the Europe of the late 1920s in search of a mission: what impact can a devil have in a godless time? What is his sorcery in a society far more diablical than the devil himself? Too idealistic for a world full of modern cruelties, the unemployable Lucifer finally finds the only means of guaranteed immortality. In \u201cThe Eternally Wandering Jew,\u201d steady Jewish conversion to Christianity results in Nathan the Talmudist reigning as Pope Urban IX. The hilarious satire on power, \u201cKings in Exile,\u201d unfolds with the dethroned monarchs of Europe meeting to found their own republic in an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"51aEDKjW-5L__SX322_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>Under Satan\u2019s Sun<\/a><\/em>, Georges Bernanos<\/div>\n
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This new translation marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Georges Bernanos\u2019s first novel, Under Satan\u2019s Sun<\/i>, a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author\u2019s deeply-felt religion. The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny.<\/div>\n
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This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest\u2019s chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\"51ceG9hLYWL__SX331_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>The Complete Stories<\/em><\/a>, Flannery O\u2019Connor<\/p>\n

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O\u2019Connor put together in her short lifetime\u2013Everything That Rises Must Converge <\/i>and A Good Man Is Hard to Find<\/i>.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor published her first story, \u201cThe Geranium,\u201d in 1946, while she was working on her master\u2019s degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, \u201cJudgement Day\u201d\u2013sent to her publisher shortly before her death\u2015is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of \u201cThe Geranium.\u201d Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\"51p8i0Rls8L__SX328_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes<\/a><\/em>, James Alison<\/p>\n

This pioneering work of theological anthropology looks at original sin in the light of the resurrection, and shows how forgiveness has become the way of transformation.\u00a0 \u201cA summa of sorts\u2014thoroughly original. While remaining faithful to tradition, James Alison is constantly breaking new ground for its understanding and application.\u201d \u2014Andrew J. McKenna, chair of the department of modern languages, Loyola University of Chicago \u201cA terrific book\u2014like everything James Alison does\u2014full of tremendous spiritual and theological insight.\u201d \u2014Ren\u00e9 Girard, author of Violence and the Sacred<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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BONUS: AN OLD CLASSIC<\/p>\n

\"51KHTK4YTHL__SX303_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>The Concept of Sin<\/a><\/em>, Josef Pieper<\/p>\n

In ordinary conversation, including among the \u201ceducated\u201d, the word \u201csin\u201d rarely gets mentioned except when one is trying to be coy or facetious. As Thomas Mann once said, \u201csin\u201d is nowadays \u201can amusing word used only when one is trying to get a laugh\u201d.<\/p>\n

But this small work will interpret sin in its true \u2014 that is, serious \u2014 meaning. What will emerge from its analysis is the discovery that the concept of sin can still serve to unlock the mystery of existence, at least for a thinking that wants to press down to the very foundations.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, such an effort will require a kind of \u201cmining energy\u201d of an archeologist of ideas who knows how to recover what was once known (or at least suspected) from time immemorial but has now been forgotten. But Josef Pieper does more than bring to bear on this issue his famous powers of excavation; he also makes meaningful the concept of sin to the ways of thinking and speaking of our time.<\/p>\n

Readers of his work already know Pieper as an extraordinarily fitting master in this art of making \u201cthe wisdom of the ages\u201d a living reality today. And in this work he brings Plato, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas into a living dialogue with T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, even with Jean-Paul Sartre. As he shows in this powerful work, none of these writers leaves any doubt that the fact of sin is central: It is the willful denial of one\u2019s own life-ground, a denial that alone rightly bears the name of \u201csin\u201d. Paradoxically, this reality is both willed and yet also pre-given, that is, both adventitious and yet somehow innate to our existence \u2014 a paradox which, next to the mystery of existence itself, is the most impenetrable mystery of all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other noteworthy books: The Fire and the Rose Are One<\/em><\/a> (Sebastian Moore), Busy Monsters<\/em><\/a> (William Giraldi), The Land of Ulro<\/em><\/a> (Czeslaw Milosz), The Living Thoughts of Soren Kierkegaard<\/em><\/a> (W.H. Auden, ed.).<\/p>\n

See also: A True Opium for the People is a Belief in Nothingness After Death<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n