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14 Sin: The Refusal to Accept Our Place The ecological theology and embrace of the common creation story that takes center stage in The Body of God is given perhaps its most powerful and important expression in this selection on sin. Here McFague shows how the classical Christian understanding, which privileges sin against God, is not contradicted but is deepened by this ecological perspective, as it allows us to understand sin against other humans, other creatures, and against the earth itself as tantamount to sin against God, in and through whom all creation has its being. Sin, then, is living a lie relative to those key relationships, contrary to the reality of our place in the world, misunderstanding the nature of our difference in creation. Thus McFague’s concept of sin may be seen as also essential to understanding her developing anthropology. Source: 1993:113–29 The common creation story gives us a functional, working cosmology. It gives us a way of understanding where we fit.1 It tells us that we belong and where we belong: it is both a welcoming word celebrating our grandeur as the most developed, complex creatures on our planet to date and a cautionary word reminding us that we belong in a place, not all places, on the earth. In the words of James Gustafson, human beings are thus reminded of “their awesome possibilities and their inexorable limitations.”2 The Genesis myth no longer functions for most people as a working cosmology, as a framework providing a sense of space and place, grandeur and groundedness, possibilities and limitations, for the conduct of daily living. The Genesis myth, rich and profound as it still can be shown to be, does not strike most people as a working model or construct within which the ordinary events and details of their lives can be understood. Moreover, the creation story that does function, at least implicitly, in Western culture is one heavy with otherworldly overtones, seeing human beings as resident aliens on the earth. But the common creation 179 story has for many people immediate credibility upon first hearing. “So this is where I, we, fit, not as a little lower than the angels but as an inspirited body among other living bodies, one with some distinctive and marvelous characteristics and some genuine limitations. I am of the earth, a product of its ancient and awesome history, and I really and truly belong here. But I am only one among millions, now billions of other human beings, who have a place, a space, on the earth. I am also a member of one species among millions, perhaps billions, of other species that need places on the earth. We are all, human beings and other species, inhabitants of the same space, planet earth, and interdependent in intricate and inexorable ways. I feel a sense of comfort, of settledness, of belonging as I consider my place in this cosmology, but also a sense of responsibility, for I know that I am a citizen of the planet. I have an expanded horizon as I reflect on my place in the common creation story: I belong not only to my immediate family or country or even my species, but to the earth and all its life-forms. I do belong to this whole. I know this now. The question is, can I, will I, live as if I did? Will I accept my proper place in the scheme of things? Will we, the human beings of the planet, do so?” This little meditation has led us into the second major contribution of the common creation story to a theological anthropology: not only does it give us a functional cosmology but also a grounded or earthly notion of sin. One of the advantages of starting our reflections on human existence with our possibilities and limitations as seen in light of the common creation story is that it keeps them from being overstated or spiritualized. In this story we are not a little lower than the angels, nor the only creatures made in the image of God: our particular form of grandeur is in relation to the earth and derived from it—we are the self-conscious, responsible creatures. Likewise, in the common creation story, we are not sinners because we rebel against God or are unable to be sufficiently spiritual: our particular failing (closely related to our peculiar form of grandeur) is our unwillingness to stay in our place, to accept our proper...

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