"Debts" and "Debt": Reflections on Tiger Woods, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Lord's Prayer

I admit it; I am out of accord with Scripture, the Confessions, and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.

When I say the Lord’s Prayer, and when I come to the fifth petition (“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”), I always say, “forgive us our debt….”[1] I admit that the Greek text of Mt 6:12 (ta opheilemata) is clearly plural – “debts” – and that the Heidelberg Cathechism and both Westminster Catechisms explicitly translate the Greek in the plural. I further acknowledge that the General Assembly is on record (somewhere in the early 20th century, I think, although I can’t find the reference) affirming this translation as correct (in distinction from “trespasses” and “trespass against us”). So why do I insist on singularity in the face of all this support for plurality?

Blame it on Reinhold Niebuhr.

In a recent edition of Christian Century, Andrew Finstuen has a fine short article about Niebuhr, and how the great twentieth-century American theologian and ethicist might comment on the “American mess” we find ourselves in here at the close of the first decade of the twenty-first.

Finstuen observes:
Niebuhr argues that Americans overestimated the virtues of democracy and free market capitalism. On the rare occasions when Americans repented of their misdeeds, they did so by focusing of sins rather than the condition of sin inherent in them. Niebuhr spent a career warning of the dangers of this attitude and its destructive consequences. The disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic crisis are, from a Niebuhrian perspective, the terrible yet predictable outcomes of a nation unwilling to regard itself as a sinner.[2]

As I write these words, the news media are full of stories about Tiger Woods’s putative misadventures with various women to whom he is not married. The journalistic “tsk-tsking” over Woods’s apparent failure to remain faithful to his marriage has superseded both the health care debate and the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I find it fascinating that we are ready to tread the moral high road when it comes to the peccadilloes of our sports heroes, but don’t see the moral issues implicit in undeclared wars and uninsured people.

In truth, though, my point is not to take a side on the question of the political or moral legitimacy of our nation’s present war efforts. Neither am I interested in sacrificing athletes on the altar of public sensibility. My point is theological: we have a tendency to think of “sins” rather than of “sin” – of particular misdeeds rather than of the underlying alienation from God that gives rise to those misdeeds. Thinking this way leads us to believe that if we but reform the problematic areas of our conduct – restrain our tendencies toward overindulgence, refrain from inappropriate sexual behavior, clean up our language – that we can legitimately lay claim to being a righteous people living in a righteous nation whose actions on the global stage are, logically, righteous.

Niebuhr argues that such an equation – “sin” equals “misdeeds” – forgets the Biblical story of Eden. It forgets that the fundamental problem of original sin was not the act but the attitude: not Eve’s taking a bite of the apple, but the human impulse to self-protection and mistrust of God that prompted her to take the bite. Sin is a response to the basic anxiety posed by the possibility that things might not be as good as God promised. In response to that anxiety, we choose not to trust God but to claim power that is not ours in an effort to ensure that we get our way. Sin, Niebuhr argued, is not the things we do or don’t do; it is mistrust of God in the face of the anxiety of existence. Sin underlies all human reality, and we cannot change it by dint of our own efforts.

Niebuhr reminds us that we are not righteous simply because we clean up our act. Righteousness does not come from amending our various personal misbehaviors or remedying our manifold social ills. Neither putting more troops in Afghanistan nor withdrawing our troops from it, neither creating a “public option” for health insurance nor trusting capitalist principles to improve medical delivery, neither refraining from extramarital affairs nor being drug-free nor eating less red meat will make us righteous. Each may contribute in its own way to a better life for some or all. But in the end, righteousness is not earned. It’s a gift. You don’t earn a gift; you receive it from a free and sovereign Giver.

It’s Advent, the season in which we reflect on the gift of Jesus Christ into the world of first-century Judaism and the coming of God’s transformation of the world as a whole. The amazing good news of Advent is that Christ comes to work God’s transformation on the world quite apart from whether we behave ourselves or not. Christ dies on the cross not merely to deliver us from our particular and personal failures, but to demonstrate that there are no dread depths of human depravity into which God’s redemptive grace cannot reach. Christ rises from the tomb to overcome the basic condition of sin that ensnares us all, both individually and as churches and nations. Christ “reigns in power for us” as the ongoing assurance that we do not hope in vain, that things-as-they-are will not be things-as-God-will-have-them. Believing anything less sells the gospel short.

So this Advent, when I join my voice with others of the faithful in the prayer that Jesus taught, I will say “debt” rather than “debts.” I suppose it is my small Niebuhrian protest against a concept of sin that is too small to be true, and a hope for forgiveness that is too weak to meet the need. It’s not that there aren’t particular failures or misdeeds for which I need forgiveness; there are those aplenty. It’s rather that sin is more systemic, more pervasive, more abounding than that. Fortunately, the promise of Advent is that the more sin abounds, the more abounds God’s amazing grace.

May God bless you this Advent, and in all the days to come.

[1] I make a similar change to the third paragraph of the Apostles’ Creed: “the forgiveness of sin…” rather than “sins.”
[2] Andrew Finstuen, “This American Mess,” Christian Century, December 1, 2009. P. 11