Pilgrimage Ponderings
Ignorance and Sin
I am still pondering a continuing education event I attended last week. The subject was gnosticism. One presenter said that he would have been a gnostic had he lived in biblical times, because gnostics were free thinkers. Another presentation made the conventional case for why gnosticism was declared heresy and contrary to orthodoxy.
What I have been pondering is the statement that the greatest problem of human nature for gnostics was not sin but ignorance. The idea is that if I know God and know myself, I will make the right choices and live a good life. What we call "sin" can be explained by a lack of knowledge of God and self somewhere along the way.
I consider myself a free thinking, open-minded person. But I discovered that I am unwilling to let go of a doctrine of sin. Maybe I don't know myself well enough, but I find that I resonate with Paul's idea that "The good that I know to do, I don't do, and I find myself doing against the good even when I know better." Of course that is a paraphrase, but it gives the main idea.
At the same time, I am thinking that a lot of ignorance masquerades as sin, and we can do damage by rushing to judgment too quickly. I'm not sure it works in the reverse, however. We spent some time at this event discussing meaningless violence. A murder was described as a "senseless act." I realized that I don't use such a term very often. In my mind, a man who breaks into a family's home and shoots them is committing a sin, whether he is ignorant or not. I guess I can't imagine a person not knowing on some level that murder is wrong.
Ignorance and sin. Are they one and the same? I'd love for you to post and tell me whether you think it matters how we name it.
