So asks my colleague Jeffrey Jay Lowder.  

A Sin Is a Sin Is a Sin… Or Is it?

The occasion for Jeff’s query was a debate between “Bible-believing” Christians over how upset one ought to get about homosexuality, assuming as they do that God has prohibited it (in itself a fascinating and complex question for another day). Some are willing to admit that homosexual practice is a sin, but then everybody’s a sinner. Why pick on the poor gays? Are they worse than eminently forgivable adulterers (especially those in the ministry)? Than white collar criminals? Than liars or over-eaters (“gluttons”)? To make such a big deal out of homosexuality is holier-than-thou, isn’t it? And boy do we know Jesus detested that one! A sin’s a sin, and everybody’s a sinner, right?

The stricter camp replies that, while all sins are equally “sins,” offenses against God’s will, some are more serious than others, both in terms of their worldly consequences and in the degree of punishment they merit. Who would glibly suggest that child-molestation is really not much worse than shop-lifting, so we shouldn’t give the pederasts such a hard time? Does either side in this debate seem to have the balance of New Testament teaching on its side? I don’t mean the homosexuality issue per se; I mean the notion that sins may be ranked by gravity.

I think that New Testament writers do grade some sins as worse than others. First Corinthians 5:1 speaks of a kind of incestuous marriage that is outrageous even by pagan standards. (Seems some guy had married his stepmother after the death of his father.) Paul demands his ouster from the congregation, lest he ruin the reputation of the church. Luke 12:47-48 says people (probably church administrators) who know their duty and blow it off will receive worse punishment than those who do the same but ignorantly. So sins of ignorance receive some mitigation. Mark 12:38-40 says pious hypocrites who evict destitute widows will receive worse punishment than others. First Corinthians 6:18-19 makes prostitution uniquely wicked since it degrades the body in a way other sins, involving actions external to the body, do not. Why this should make it more heinous is not quite clear to me. I’m not even sure how this sin is uniquely “bodily.” After all, are you astral projecting when you commit the rest? 

Mortal versus Venereal Sin

But even such sins may be forgiven, or so the New Testament writers say. God is very patient and does not relish the destruction of the wicked. No, he would much prefer people avail themselves of the ample opportunities of repentance he has provided. But even God eventually draws the line. Where?

First John 5:16-17 speaks of "mortal sins," unidentified transgressions of some type that are so severe that the writer advises not to waste the time praying for any friend who has committed them. Why doesn’t he spell it out? Maybe he figured the readers all knew which sins were fatal. Or maybe he thought it best to keep them guessing and thus to keep them on their toes.

Mark 3:28-29 makes the astonishing remark that “all sins will be forgiven men,” a general amnesty, except for one sin that outweighs them all: blasphemy, the single unforgivable sin. The relevant quote has been worked into a larger context where Jesus’ opponents are dismissing his exorcisms as mere magic, and he warns them not to defame what is patently the work of the Spirit of God. Thus he speaks of “blaspheming the Holy Spirit.” But originally the saying must have meant something all by itself. Another version of the saying occurs in Matthew 12:32. “Whoever says anything against the son of man may be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, whether in this age or in the age to come.” “Son of man” here only means “human beings,” as in Psalm 8. No one is saying you can badmouth Jesus ( the Son of Man) and get away with it, but that you’d better watch out if you start taking pot-shots at the Holy Ghost! No, just as “son of man” only means “man,” “the Holy Spirit” here refers to God, period. It is pious paraphrase, “hallowing the name” of God. It denotes God, the Divine Spirit. So we are talking about blasphemy as traditionally conceived, nothing special or more specific. 

Covering a Multitude of Sins

Fundamentalists seem to be quite uncomfortable with the notion of a single act that causes one to forfeit salvation. So when they run across such passages in scripture they try to persuade themselves that “blasphemy” or “mortal sin” refers (instead) to a stubborn refusal to accept Christ as one’s personal savior. According to their doctrine, it is no particular sin or group of sins that leads to damnation. God forgives one’s sins, even the ones not yet committed, as a package deal once one receives Christ as one’s personal savior. In short, they are telling us it is a particular religious allegiance that provides the ticket to salvation, so that, in effect, it is the failure to join up that damns. “He that believeth not is damned” (Mark 16:16b). “If you do not believe that I am he, you shall die in your sins” (John 8:24). “There is no other name under heaven, given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). “All who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death … so that… we might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3-4). “Whoever hears my word and believes on him who sent me will not come to the judgment but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24). “Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). 

But is it really simple unbelief that damns? Here we gaze down into one of the greatest chasms in New Testament theology, for we are still said to have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and to hear the verdict on our lives and how we lived them (2 Cor. 5:10; Rev. 20:12; Acts 24:15-16, etc.). Why should that be, if it has all been taken care of at the cross? Did Christ die in vain (Gal. 2::21)? We still have to watch our step or we will be damned, no? Christ’s coming does not seem to have changed that prospect. So what has changed but religious allegiance? This may be the biggest doctrinal problem of the New Testament. Some, e.g., Lutherans, have tried their best to make the New Testament teach with one voice that salvation is by grace as of the coming of Christ, but they just have too many passages to explain away. It becomes what I call “hermeneutical ventriloquism.”

The question, “Are some sins more sinful than others?” masks a deeper question: “Are the righteous saved, or is only believers in a particular doctrine or savior?” If one prefers the latter answer, then all sins are interchangeably unimportant, since the only thing that damns is not joining the club. 

Robert M. Price

You have put your finger on one of the prime examples of what Rudolf Bultmann said was wrong with mythology. Though, he said, it is the proper and inevitable language of religion, dealing as it does with matters that are not mundane facts, myths cry out for existential interpretation, lest their intended message be lost. Mythology speaks of the Transcendent in terms of the immanent, the only thing it can do, after all, since all language derives from our everyday experience of the world. Myth, a type of poetry, strives to create (the illusion of?) momentary transcendence, something that can really only be experienced , not explained. If we try to take the stories of religious mythology literally, we miss their point and wind up thinking we have to defend a lot of pre-scientific nonsense. For example, myth speaks of God living way up there , e.g., atop a high mountain (Sinai, Olympus, etc.). God is pictured as being separated from us geographically . So what? Philosophy and theology by contrast, speak of God being separated from us ontologically , belonging to (or constituting) a “higher” order of Being. If we feel the impulse to worship or the call of absolute moral obligation, it is the Transcendent we sense, not mere spatial distance.

In the case of Job, particularly the famous prose prologue to which you refer, we find a strictly mythical God, one who keeps order in the universe by means of a bureaucracy of subordinate governors (the “sons of God,” gods or angels who each rule one country as Jehovah’s lieutenants) and who keeps an eye on things by means of a patrolling security chief, “the Satan” (which was originally no proper name but rather a title, “prosecuting attorney” including sting operations man), who roams the world, keeping files on people whose supposed loyalty to God he questions. Job, for instance. At this point in the evolution of biblical mythology “the Satan” is not yet considered an evil being or an opponent of God. That happens later and only insofar as he has somehow been combined with evil mythic entities including Beelzebul (Mark 3:22-23), Ahriman (Luke 10:19) or Leviathan (Revelation 12:9). In the Old Testament (Zechariah 3:1-5; 1 Chronicles 21:1) he is God’s servant, testing God’s mortal servants. He continues this role even in the New Testament (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 22:31; Revelation 12:10). This is what we see him doing in Job chapters 1 and 3.

All of this, obviously, implies that God does not know what the outcome will be—unless the point is that he knows Job well enough and merely wants to vindicate his trust in him against the Satan’s suspicions. It all bears the character of a folktale and even appears to be based on earlier Babylonian legends of a righteous sufferer pestered by evil spirits. But the point underlying the whole story is that it is really Job who must be shown what he is made of. By extension, the reader is invited to ask whether his devotion to God is all he hopes it is. For non-theists nothing is lost, since we, too, need to view life’s tragedies as challenges and opportunities, unless we are to be crushed by them.

Bultmann said we can see the process of demythologizing (interpreting the myth for its existential value, since all myths embody a culture or a religion’s self-understanding) already in the New Testament, even in the Old. This is certainly true of the Book of Job. This becomes apparent once one learns that the first two chapters and the last part of the final chapter are portions of a prose folktale version of Job, and that someone has separated it into a prologue and an epilogue for the huge central section, which is very much like a Greek drama. There is nothing in the poetic drama about a wager between God and Satan; we never learn why or even if God is behind Job’s travails, or whether Satan has anything to do with it. Job bitterly complains of how God is tormenting him for no reason, while his self-righteous friends are assuring him he must have committed some sin, since God does not afflict the righteous. (We call what they are doing “blaming the victim.”) God appears and rebukes these know-it-alls, especially Job. How dare a pipsqueak like him, with the limitations of a mere mortal, presume to figure out what God is up to and to second guess his plans? In other words, the text accuses Job and his friends, with their complacent assumptions about an anthropomorphic deity, what God does and why—of superstition . Yes, demythologizing has begun.

Robert M. Price

One of the most notorious passages in the Bible has got to be the infamous 2 Kings 2:23-25, an anecdote from the career of the prophet Elisha. The text is morally repugnant, virtually pre-moral. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the story teller that there is any problem with the tale he tells. It must get less airplay from the pulpit than almost any other portion of the Bible (with the possible exception of numerous snooze-inducing genealogies). Here it is, as rendered in the Revised Standard Version:

He went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys. From there he went on to Carmel, and thence he returned to Samaria.

It is not that there is nothing for the poor preacher to say about the passage. As we will see momentarily, there is in fact much to say. It’s just that there’s nothing good , nothing edifying or uplifting, to say about it. It goes so far in the other direction that any moral lesson a preacher may try to hang on it will seem so preposterous, so far-fetched, that few will risk the embarrassment. Well, this is no sermon, so we aren’t under such constraints. Let’s see what we can say about the story of Elisha and the Bears.

First, we are to picture the prophet, the successor to the miracle-working Elijah, making his rounds like one of the circuit-riding preachers of nineteenth-century frontier America. Shortly he will pull into town and receive donations for psychic feats such as finding lost objects, giving oracles, interpreting dreams (like Samuel the seer does in 1 Samuel 9:3-12). And then on to the next hamlet. As we meet him, he is headed up hill along the road to Bethel, where there had been a shrine for centuries (Genesis 28:10-17), originally dedicated to now-forgotten (or suppressed) gods and nature sprites. A local youth gang knows to expect him, because of his regular schedule, and they go out to meet him. There must be some fifty or more of them, quite a party, since at the end we learn that forty-two of them, not all of them, perished, implying others survived to tell the tale. What exactly do they say to the chrome-domed prophet? Are they urging him on his way? “Go up to the shrine at Bethel, baldy?” It would be a strange (p)reversal of the friendly reception Jesus gets centuries later when a chorus of kids cheers his entry  into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:15).

But maybe “Go up!” refers to the rumored ascension into the sky of Elisha’s mentor Elijah (2 Kings 2:11-12). Maybe these kids belong to the Bethel chapter of Camp Inquiry; they refuse to believe in Elijah’s departure into the blue, and they are mocking Elisha: “Can’t you do the same? That was bunk, and you’re a faker!” And, of course, Elisha does not disappoint them! If it’s a miracle they want to see, well, he’s got one up his sleeve! Not exactly the one they asked for, but beggars can’t be choosers. And, besides, the little creeps did “ask for it,” right? I’ll come back to this in a moment, but I have to mention another possibility, one representing an earlier stage of transmission of the story. 

Many biblical characters seem to have begun as mythic personifications of the heavenly bodies. ¹ Biblical sun gods include Enoch, Isaac, Esau, Moses, Samson (whose name simply means “the sun”), Elijah, Jonah, and maybe even Jesus. Israelite moon gods include Abraham, Jacob, and Elisha. Often the stories pair them and show conflict between them, one getting the advantage of the other, but only temporarily. This motif reflects the eternal cycle of sun and moon, each dominating the sky in turn. (There’s a great Star Trek: Next Generation episode about the same thing, remember?) Well, it is no coincidence that Elijah commands the fire from heaven (2 Kings 1:10, 12), causes drought (1 Kings 17:14), rises into the heavens aboard Apollo’s fiery chariot—and has long hair (2 Kings 1:8) representing the sun’s rays. He disappears, to be replaced by Elisha, who also “goes up” and is bald . I’m guessing that what we now read as the repeated jeering of the neighborhood toughs was originally part of a ritual chant to summon forth the rising moon. The ancient Israelite nomads, being shepherds, preferred the gentle company of the moon to the blistering scrutiny of the sun, and so it was to the former that they offered the firstlings of their flocks, making sure to finish the sacrificial feast before the moon went down (Deuteronomy 16:4). But the story of the children welcoming the divine moon has been retold, like so many others, once Israel began the slow and unsteady transition toward monotheism. Gods became angels, heroes, judges, just so the stories could continue to be told. And they had to be reapplied to new purposes. One no longer dared glorify the exploits of the old gods.

As we now read it, the story of Elisha and the Bears is a prime example of a “cautionary tale,” a scare story told in order to keep the intimidated listeners in their place—as defined by their rulers. Other such biblical scare stories include that of the expulsion from Eden in Genesis chapter 3 (how dare mere mortals covet the knowledge that belongs to God—and his priests—alone?), the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9 (again, it discourages inventive autonomy), Uzzah (2 Samuel 6:6-11) getting zapped for steadying the Ark of the Covenant without ritual preparation (“Men, don’t let this happen to you!”), and the death of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11 (don’t welsh on your church pledge!). These are all religious boundary markers, warning people not to envy their betters lest God smite them, not to help themselves to the privileges inherited by the sacred aristocracy. Rene Girard explains it all so well in his seminal work Violence and the Sacred . ² Socio-religious classes or castes constitute a stable social order, no matter how inflexible it may be, and no matter how it may curtail freedom and opportunity for individuals within it. Such order was achieved in the society’s red dawn, when the “War of All against All” (Thomas Hobbes) was finally settled, and lines were drawn to the disadvantage of the losers. Whenever the lower castes’ envy of the upper castes’ privileges threatens to boil over again, these cautionary tales will be trotted out to remind people (albeit in a somewhat disguised form) of the massive violence from which order once emerged and into which it could collapse again. Is it worth risking the return to Chaos and Old Night? Ah… maybe not.

It is obvious that our Elisha story performed this function. It warned the hearers of the prophets not to make mockery of them. Jeremiah and others warned the people not to disdain the prophetic messages lest they face the consequences of foreign invasions from which God would otherwise protect them, but the Elisha business is slightly different: it seeks to safeguard the public standing of God’s messengers. If prophets were a laughingstock (as Catholic priests have become in the wake of the pederasty scandals), then who could be expected to heed God’s warnings through them? That’s the theological way of putting it. Sociologically, we should say the story is a means of protecting the social esteem in which prophets were held, keeping their hearers cowed—and willing to give them alms. Similarly, such cautionary tales functioned as propaganda against the competing claims of rival institutions who did not want to share power with the prophets. We can see this struggle in Amos 7:12-16; in Zechariah 13:1-7, as well as in Josephus’ claim that prophecy had ceased, leaving sacred authority to the scribes and priests—the professionals, the apparatchiks. Something similar is going on in the story of the earth swallowing Korah, a slap-down of uppity temple singers who dared request the same privileges as sacrificing priests (compare Numbers 16:1-11, 15-35 with Psalm 51:15-17). ³

When we look at the story of Elisha and the Bears, we can see its place and its function in sacred literature. That is, however, by no means to say that we have anything positive to learn from it. But neither is it difficult to think of others who would sympathize completely with the story of a mocked prophet invoking deadly violence on the blasphemers. Remember those Danish newspaper cartoons ridiculing the prophet Muhammad. Angry Muslims are still trying to assassinate the cartoonists. Welcome back to the ninth century BCE!

References

¹ Ignaz Goldziher, Mythology among the Hebrews and its Historical Development . Trans. Russell Martineau (NY: Cooper Square Publishers, 1967), pp. 90-169.

² Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred . Trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1977).

³ Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), pp. 85-88.