Often you will see me emphasizing the sin/grace matrix as a relational rather than a purely forensic reality. This bears out only if the One we have sinned against is in fact a personal rather than monadic law-like being. Sin is personal and relational because, first, God is a relation of triune persons. At root our relationship to Godself is indeed based upon the correspondence God has first (before the foundations of the world) established for us in His imago Dei (cf. Col. 1.15), in His free and gracious election to be with us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. So the ground of our relationship to God is necessarily relational and personalist insofar that our being, as human, is first grounded in God’s being to be human for us. When the first sin happened, Adam’s or ‘humanity’s’ being with God was ruptured requiring that our beings be restored or reconciled unto their originating ground as that was and is found in God’s triune life. Were there ‘legal’ consequences attending this fall as well? Yes. But those were only the external aspects of the real problem, which was a broken heart that no longer pumped from the vessels of God’s heart for us in Jesus Christ. That is to say, there is a deeper problem behind what might conclude in other expressions that may entail legal as well as other matters.
Matt Jenson offers good insight on how the aforementioned is fleshed out in the theology of Karl Barth:
Because sin is directed against a person rather than an abstract law of nature, relational rather than juridical categories are the fitting conceptual tools to describe it (IV/1, p. 140). The metaphor of incurvature, which carries with it the implication of having curved away from a relationship or relationships, fits well this relational character of sin. Sin is the refusal to conform to our determination in Christ to be relationally constituted and relationally directed. And the fact that even in isolation which the metaphor conveys one cannot escape the remainder of the relationships which have been shunned underscores Barth’s point that sin can only ever be self-contradiction, stopping short of self-transformation or the realization of a real, alternate possibility. Sin can only be an ‘impossible possibility’ (IV/1, pp. 409-10; IV/2, p. 495; IV/3.1, p. 463).[1]
[1] Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin (New York: T&T Clark a Continuum Imprint, 2006), 152.
Re: Sin as Primarily Relational Rather than Forensic
Yes, indeed. In the Garden of Eden, our first parents violated the relationship with their Maker. Adam’s initial response to God’s “Where are you?” was “I was afraid.” He knew he had done wrong and the relationship was no longer friendly and open. Israel’s fatal mistake was that it focused on obedience to the Law, rather than obedience to the relationship (Covenant). Our errors are the same. Many church doctrines (though they are true) emphasize the ‘forensic’ approach rather than the relational approach to God. Jesus, at the last supper, announced
“This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” (Lk 22:19b-20 ESV)
Jesus thereby set into motion the relationship His people were to obey. Justification is the legal approach to the atonement and reconciliation is the relational approach. Faithfulness to God by faith in Jesus Christ is relational.
“For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight,” (Rom 3:20 ESV)
Amen!… and emet. How significantly the metaphor of ‘incurvature’ describes the death-rending “anti-relational” character of sin, particularly alongside the character of “the law” as the ethically pragmatic demonstration of the reality of relationship. Now the perfect sense of Paul’s many admonitions that “by the works of the law no person will be justified,” and Jesus’ authoritative declarations given in his sermon on the mount… “You have heard it said…but I say unto you…” becomes fully clear!
@Mark, I wouldn’t detach justification from reconciliation. I would see them as an organic whole as that is grounded in Christ’s vicarious life for us. We are reconciled because we are justified, and vice versa. But per our thinking on the ontological theory of the atonement there is no need to sublate justification by a theological category error that others have made. Instead, I think it’s best to allow God’s Self-revelation in Christ, and all that implies doctrinally, to shape the way that justification/reconciliation are defined (biblically I would argue this under the macro covenant of marriage, and understand ‘legality’ from within this relational covenant rather than what we get from Federal theology–which, of course, erroneously inverts this order of things).
@Richard, amen to that! Yes, the whole schoolmaster vis a vis faith of Christ teaching we receive from Paul. There was always an eschatological character to the whole thing. The schoolmaster analogy already presupposes a telos, and it is that telos that in fact supplied the schoolmaster until its finality and reality came in baby Jesus’s manger.