Poor, bewildered Paul blames Canada, er, sin, for his shortcomings

Sadly, the church pretends to know why people do the bad things they do, fixating on Paul's "blame sin!" trope in today's Epistle reading from Romans 7.  Paul manifests a certain bewilderment about his own failings, and seizes on 'sin' as the explanation:

¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ... ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.^[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.

¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God's law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am!  (Emphasis added.)

Paul's inclination to blame sin for his shortcomings is neither shameful nor surprising. Even today we know little enough today about the human mind and its motivations. In Paul's day, Jesus' own disciples blamed sin as the cause of a man's blindness from birth (Jn 9.1-3); their contemporaries and Jesus himself assumed that demons and spirits were the causes of mental illness (Mt 8.28-29) and epilepsy (Mk 9.14-32).

Hey, that was the best they could do back then with the limited information they had. Sure, we moderns know a bit more about brain chemistry and psychology; as a result, we've had some limited successes in treating disorders of the kind referred to in the Gospel accounts. But it's not as if we've progressed all that much further ourselves.

What is unfortunate is that the church refuses to admit that Paul didn't know what he was talking about. Contrast that with Jesus, whose (reported) attitude seems to have been, face the facts, and acknowledge the limits of your information (e.g., Mt 11.2-5; Mt 16.1-2; Mk 13.28-35).

Instead, the church continues to canonize Paul's uninformed guesswork about 'sin' — commendable though his efforts were — as Holy Writ.

Somehow, I doubt that's what Jesus would have done.

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Related posts: 

• Sin: We've Got a Long Way to Go in Understanding It, Let Alone in 'Treating' It

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

• The Sin Model's Weakness

• Sin as Failure to Live in Relationship with God: How Can We Know?

• See also the Sin category of postings.