![]() In eternity, angels and God “know” everything immediately we know only gradually, by listening, remembering how something (whether a word or a sentence) began, and then integrating it all into an interpretation (which could always in turn be inaccurate or wrong). The goal of having these various bodies was that the soul in each body would learn what its error was, repent, and so turn back to God.Īugustine, 150 years later, held that one of the measures of humanity’s universally fallen state after Adam is that people have a dislocated consciousness: we are stuck in time, and can only know the meaning of something once we travel a narrative/temporal path from beginning through middle to the end. Their respective positions in the material universe are the index of their respective failures: the soul of a star, for example, “sinned” less/“fell” less, than my soul did, and Origen would know this because star-body is superior to fleshly human body. Stars, planets, angels, demons, humans-all these beings have (fallen) souls. ![]() His God, who loves his creation and who wants everyone to be saved from sin, then calls the material universe into existence to serve as a learning device for each fallen soul. Origen of Alexandria believed that in the time before time was created, there was a precosmic fall of the soul. You write that Christian thinkers invoked sin to account for myriad things, from the physical universe to “the grammatical structure of a sentence.” How did sin explain such things for them? Following the development of ideas of sin gave me a way to trace the changes across time within Christianity itself. The second point is that these ideas vary greatly between different religious thinkers in the same period, and certainly between different religious thinkers across different periods. So by looking at ideas of sin, we end up seeing how other ideas-about God, about humanity, about the universe-also correspond. BU Today: Why are changes over time in the Christian conception of sin important, to Christians and non-Christians?įredriksen: Ideas about sin are like radioactive isotopes: you can trace them as they course through theological systems, to see the ideological architecture of the whole. She recently spoke to BU Today about her new book. In her epilogue, she argues that current American culture downplays the whole idea of personal responsibility.įredriksen, currently on leave from BU and a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written several books on religion, among them Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life. Each era defines sin based on its own cultural assumptions for example, Jesus’ notions, molded by his exclusively Jewish audience and his belief in the approaching end of time, differed from the great Church Father Augustine, who in the fourth century was living in a Christian empire and knew that the end of time hadn’t come yet, says Fredriksen, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of religion and William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture Emerita. That seemingly simple question drew a surprising array of answers from Christian thinkers in the religion’s first four centuries, and current American culture adds its own gloss, says Paula Fredriksen in her latest book, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012). Photo of The Temptation and Fall of Eve by William Blake courtesy of Jim Forest ![]() Twitter Facebook Paula Fredriksen’s new book says early Christians took Jesus’ ideas about sin and adapted them to changing circumstance.
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