The primordial sin

I had the opportunity of hearing Father Thomas Hopko speak. He quoted a young seminary student, who is now Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA, who he said wrote a most felicitous phrase in one of his papers. I doubt I can fully quote it correctly, but he said that the phrase was that the primordial sin of man was that of trying to be god without God.

That phrase harks back to the famous saying that we are to become by grace what God is by nature. That is, God is good, so we are to be good. God is holy, so we are to be holy. God is merciful, so we are to be merciful. God is a servant God, so we are to be servants. God is love, so we are to love. This is not an odd doctrine. We were created in the image and likeness of God. In the West, those two words are seen as essentially the same thing. But, the East separates the two, and says that the image of God was never lost in humanity, but that we never grew into the likeness of God like we should.

The Orthodox doctrine of deification, of theosis, is not a doctrine that we shall become divine. Rather, it is a doctrine that has been expressed even by fundamentalist preachers. If you have ever heard a preacher say that when people look at us they should see Jesus, you have heard the doctrine of deification, though the preacher may not have realized it. We need to become little Jesus(es) by grace, learning in the power of the Holy Spirit to live out in our lives the same example that Our Lord Jesus lived out, until the day we die, even if it be the violent death of a martyr.

But, humanity threw God away (in the Fall) and decided that they would become everything they could be (be all you can be) without God’s Holy Spirit and God’s grace. The “experiment” has been an absolute failure. Without God, we make Earth into an icon of Hell. We are fortunate to live in the USA, because there are all too many countries in which famine, pestilence, war, and death run riot through the country as though the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had already arrived. Even in the USA, our spiritual blindness does not really let us see how many people suffer without hope and without help.

The Good News is that in Our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s rule has broken into this world, and even into Hell itself to break the power of sin. There is hope now. And, if Earth became an icon of Hell, the Church becomes an icon of Heaven. Each and every one of us, both individually and severally, is called to learn how to be Jesus (theosis) in order that the world can see that hope and can open up to God’s grace.