Hey everybody! This week I have the privilege of interviewing Matthew Croasmun who wrote the book The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans. It is rare for me, these days, to read a book and go “Wow!” I generally read 1-2 books per week, I spent 2 weeks going through this book because it is that good. I’m so excited to interview Matt to explore this book more with you.

In this episode, we explore a little bit about the emergence theory, sin, systemic racism, white supremacy and the gospel, and how the church should address issues of sin. I highly encourage you to check out his book The Emergence of Sin.

Matthew is the Associate Research Scholar and the director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. He also is a pastor at Elm City Vineyard Church. To learn more about Matthew be sure to visit his website.

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John Milton Chivington (January 27, 1821 – October 4, 1894) was an American Methodist minister, Mason, and mass murderer. How is it possible that Methodist minister, Mason, and mass murderer are all used to describe the same man? Being a mass murderer is hardly in line with the tenets of either Methodism or Freemasonry. Yet, John Chivington is responsible for the murder of somewhere between 200-400 Cheyenne, mostly women, and their children. 

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So began the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, written by a slave owner for a slave-owning nation built upon a genocidal war against Native American peoples. 

In April of 1994, the government of Rwanda called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill the Tutsi minority. Over the next three months, almost 1,000,000 Tutsis were murdered by their neighbors. Who cannot read Philip Gourevitch’s account of the massacre, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” and not wonder what does it mean to be a human being today? 

We could go on, recounting and repeating horror stories from the Nazis, the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman’s mass killings of the Armenians, Stalin’s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians, as well as the nightmares that visited Cambodia, or the tribal wars from every inhabited continent. History is littered with humans seeking the total destruction of other humans. 

And we always ask, “How could these people commit such atrocities against other human beings?”  The answer is two-fold. First, in the eyes of the aggressors, these were not atrocities, these were acts of virtuous violence. Secondly, the atrocities were not atrocities because the victims were not seen as fully “human.” (See A Descent into Sacred Violence)

In tandem with the descent into sacred violence, the aggressors must engage in a campaign to defame and dehumanize their victims. Rather than being human, these victims are dogs, rats, human filth, enemies of the people, and vermin. Native Americans were not humans created equal by God; they were savages. Africans were not created equal with all other humans and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They were three-fifths human whose purpose was to serve their owners. Jews were not humans to the Nazis. They were rats, filth, and lice. The pattern is the same: Defame, Dehumanize, Destroy. 

The logic goes like this: We are not destroying humans, we are ridding the earth of savages, sub-human vermin who carry filthy diseases, commit crimes, defile our women, our children, our culture, our race, and our way of life. The only sensible response is to put them down like a rabid dog or put them in their place beneath us as our inferiors. 

These acts of violence may be extreme. Most likely, no one reading these words has directly participated in genocidal mass murder. However, what about that more tamed and domesticated breed of the same worldview that differs only by degree but not in kind? 

Is there a fundamental difference between hatred that erupts into murder and the hatred that spews out sexist insults, racial slurs, demeaning and dehumanizing comments all intended for the single purpose of destroying something in the other and placing them beneath you? Jesus doesn’t seem to think there was much of a difference (Matthew 5:21-26). 

In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr makes painfully clear how upright citizens with strict personal moral codes will simultaneously comply with and cooperate with oppressive systems and leaders who undermine basic decency and perpetuate real harm and evil, especially toward ethnic minorities, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. Niebuhr explains, “As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic, and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command” (Reinhold Niebuhr, Major Works on Religion and Politics, p. 156). 

The desire to exalt ourselves and our group and the desire to dominate and subjugate “them” infects our political, social, and religious worlds. Sadly, even our own homes are no safeguard against the dehumanizing effects of our broken humanity. As evil as racism is, it is only one of many manifestations of this urge for self-exaltation and the destruction of the other. 

In Christ, God overthrew and destroyed the body of Sin (Romans 6:6) and created one new humanity (Ephesians 2:15) called the body of Christ. The Gospel overthrows our clamoring for self-exaltation and the subjugation of the other. To participate in self-exaltation and the subjugation of others is not only inconsistent with the Gospel; it is a denial of the Gospel. 

My prayer is that we, the body of Christ, become Ambassadors of the Peace and Reconciliation God brings to the world in Christ. We are called to speak the Word of another King and another kingdom. May we be faithful to this task. 

To do violence on a grand scale, one must first dehumanize the future victims and consecrate the future aggressors as noble warriors on a sacred mission that pits “us” against “them.” 

The downward spiral of dehumanization requires the creation of a mythology of a lost greatness and glory that can only be restored when the human scum and enemies of the people are purged from among “us;” offered up upon the altars of sacrifice to a grand and sacred cause sanctioned by the god of our Nationalist confession. 

To achieve mass delusions sufficient to move from the fringes to a place of power requires propaganda and ideology that exploits feelings of humiliation, alienation, ambition, victimhood, and bloodlust amongst the base, enlivening them to fervor and action. For the propaganda to be effective requires the destruction of truth, the re-writing of history, the polarization of “us” and “them,” and a demagogic ringleader who claims only he alone can lead the real and true “elect ones” into a future greatness. Consequently, all pursuits of truth and facts are castigated as fake and biased. Alternative facts replace actual facts. Truth-tellers, whistle-blowers, and systems of accountability are the first victims in the descent into sacred violence. 

The masses are desensitized through language, lies, metaphor, and celebrations of retaliation against those blamed for “our great demise.” Anyone who is not among “us:” the real believers; the real patriots; the real good and decent people; must be crushed by any and all means necessary. “They” are dirty, lazy, criminals, drug-dealers, godless, human scum, and enemies of the people. 

In their fascinating study of the “virtuous violence theory,” Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai observe, “Most violence is morally motivated. People do not simply justify or excuse their violent actions after the fact; at the moment they act, people intend to cause harm or death to someone they feel should suffer or die.” Fiske and Rai go on to explain how people are morally motived to do violence in order to create a new future, protect some point of pride or honor, and redress a grievance. Violence is described as actions in which the perpetrator regards inflicting suffering, pain, fear, distress, injury, maiming, disfigurement, or death as the intrinsic, necessary, or desirable means to accomplish a desired result. “Insults, taunting, and cursing often precede [physical] violence, and are motivated by the same relational intentions” (p. 15). 

Walter Wink refers to this type of violence as “The Myth of Redemptive Violence.” Wink describes the Myth of Redemptive Violence as “the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence.” Wink observes this myth of redemptive violence enshrines the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. “This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.” 

It is a dark stain upon Christianity that we Christians have too often been advocates of virtuous, or redemptive, violence. Susannah Heschel records the shameful complicity of the German Christian Movement as a nationalist movement in full support of Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Numerous German Protestant theologians during Hitler’s Third Reich redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with the Jews. In 1939, these world-acclaimed theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. The Institute sponsored propaganda conferences, published books defaming Jews and Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Somehow the light of the world betrayed the humble Jew from Galilee and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in favor of a Führer promising to restore the greatness of the Fatherland. 

Unfortunately, this is hardly the only time large numbers of Christians have been on the wrong side of the Gospel and humanity. Christians advocating the “manifest destiny” of American greatness justified and advocated for the genocide of the Native American peoples. Religious wars in Europe lasted for generations, slaughtering thousands in the name of the Prince of Peace. 

Today, throughout the globe, the rising tide of Nationalism is being joined by hordes of Christians who turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the destruction of truth, the polarization of society, and the emergence of fascist totalitarianism while hiding behind some claim of upholding biblical values. The descent into sacred violence is always justified with moral arguments. Unfortunately, these moral arguments have been cut off from the Tree of Life and have become little more than a thin veneer covering up a lust for power. We have seen this movie before. Many times. It never ends well.

I fear we are watching the emergence of a New Dark Age, a time when belief systems blind the eyes and closes the mind to truth, reality, and facts. 

The Dark Ages is a pejorative term once used to describe the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance (5^th-15^th Century CE). The Dark Ages were allegedly an age of ignorance, violence, backwardness, barbarism, and superstition overseen and controlled by the Christian Church that placed religious authority over personal experience and scientific research. The Protestant mythology of my youth told me the Dark Ages was a time when Catholics locked away the Bible from the common people to keep them in bondage to the pope. I vividly recall hearing a preacher claim during the Dark Ages Catholics would chain Bibles to the pulpit to keep everyone except the priests from reading the Scriptures. Only later did I learn that books were extremely valuable, costing a small fortune to own. Bibles, which were typically works of art as well as Sacred Scripture, were exceptionally expensive. Consequently, these Bibles were chained to the pulpit to keep them from being stolen and sold on the black market.  

The idea of the Dark Ages originated with the Tuscan scholar Petrarch in the 1330s. Thankfully, as scholars and researchers discovered more about this period, academicians in the twentieth century began to drop the term, preferring the more neutral Middle Ages instead. 

Unfortunately, even though the name has changed, numerous myths continue to circulate about the Middle Ages. Most, if not all, of these myths are devoid of any evidence. Myths like everyone in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers have shown there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not know the earth was round and even knew its approximate circumference. Myths such as: “the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages,” “the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science,” and “the medieval Christian church suppressed the growth of natural philosophy,” are examples of myths that still pass as historical truth, although unsupported by current research. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of horrible things that happened during the Middle Ages, just like in every age. The point I am making is the Middle Ages, the so-called Dark Ages, did not have a corner on darkness. 

But, let’s take this phrase The Dark Age as a condition where belief rules over truth, evidence, reality, and facts, and apply it to what is happening in our world today, and ask, Are we entering a New Dark Age? 

 James Bridle makes the case that as the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. While we are lost in a sea of information, we are increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. 

Somehow, we must make epistemology appealing again. Belief unhinged from reality ruthlessly overrules reason, truth, and these persistent little things called facts. 

Try having a fact-based conversation with someone who believes the earth is flat, Obama is a Muslim, the holocaust never happened, the Illuminati secretly run the world, or the global headquarters of the New World Order is underneath the Denver Airport,  and you will see what I mean. On second thought, you probably should not waste your time. Their belief overrules everything else. Facts be damned. Reality be accursed. Truth be silent. 

As those who are called to follow The Truth, we can do better than this. As Ed Stetzer said, “God has not called us to be easily fooled. Gullibility is not a Christian virtue, and we ought not to act like that.” Let us be persistent and insistent on following the truth, regardless of where it leads us. Christians ought to set the highest standards for when it comes to speaking the truth in love, for “in a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” (George Orwell).