A few thoughts about sin.

I don’t believe in sin, but Paul Tillich did, and I found his concept of sin to be useful. Tillich believed that people lived in a state of estrangement and that they longed to be reconciled to their fellow human beings, the world around them and to the Ground of Being.

He said that this was the driving force of love. He defined love as the urge toward the reunion of the separated. Considering the way Tillich defined “sin”, you could say that the desire to reunite is also the driving force behind it, too.

Tillich claimed that there were three basic “sins”. First, there is unbelief. You lose faith in God, the Ground of Being, or life, or humanity or whatever. You no longer believe in something higher than yourself. It’s all about you. The second “sin” follows from the first: hubris. You become the focus of your life. Your needs become paramount, and no one else really matters. You become your own god. The third “sin” is concupiscence. Rather than trying to reconcile yourself to the world, you attempt to reconcile the world to you. You do this by attempting to bring as much of the world under your sphere of influence and control as possible.

Concupiscence can be expressed in a variety of ways: the hoarding of money, seeking power and fame, having numerous sexual encounters or collecting baseball cards. But none of these things are “sins”, according to Tillich, in and of themselves. They only become “sins” when there is a spirit of concupiscence present. The person doing these things must be striving for some kind of control and dominance.

In Tillich’s view, sexual desire and sexual activity, even with multiple partners, is an expression of love. It only becomes “sin” when there is a form of conquest involved.

Anything you do can be a form of concupiscence in Tillich’s theology, including celibacy if you’re doing it in order to conquer and make your acceptability inevitable.

Obviously, our ability to control the greater world is exceedingly limited. We are mere specks that exist for seconds in an ageless and unimaginably huge universe. We can relish being a part of this grand mystery, or we can rebel against it and try to win it over.

I don’t know if there is a god or not, and I certainly don’t claim to know why we’re here or what we’re supposed to do while we’re here. But reading Tillich in my youth has helped me in determining my own course of action. I can either accept and appreciate the world and my little role, my hour on the stage for what they are, or I can attempt to own the world and become the master of my own fate. The latter seems like a lot of work, and I’ll still end up dead no matter what.