Sin, Genetics & Spiritual Exercise
I'm back on my diet. For the past couple of months, I've eaten and drunk like there's no tomorrow--only there always was a tomorrow, and it arrived to find me needing to lose twenty pounds. I suppose it would be easy just to chalk up my struggles to bad genetics and use that as an excuse for my rotten habits. It is easy, to be honest, because I've used that excuse for long stretches of time. It's also easy to fall into despair, and live in a funk when you realize your life won't be exactly like you wish it could be because you're going to have to watch what you eat and drink for the rest of your days. Oh, and you might have to also exercise--a lot. I think that many of the problems that Christians struggle with are connected to something similar. There's this idea that pervades most of Christian teaching about sin that needs some deeper thought. I'm talking about the idea that we all inherited some sort of "sin gene" t...