It's In the Code, Ep. 11: We Live in a Fallen World
What does it mean when Christians say that we “live in a fallen world”? Where does that language come from? Most importantly, what to different kinds of Christians do with that language? Dan tackles these topics in this episode, discussing what different kinds of Christians imagine when they describe the world as “fallen,” how they think we should respond to that, and exploring how that plays out in our contemporary culture.
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Hello and welcome to the series.
It's In the Code, part of our podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, we are hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and want to thank them for their support.
And want to thank all of you, everybody who simply supports us by listening, those of you who are patrons and friends who donate to the podcast, help keep us going, those of you who download and keep the numbers such that we can afford to do this, we thank all of you, and in particular for this series, those of you who contact me and reach out with ideas for this series.
As I always say, I want this to be something sort of from the ground up, And I cannot respond to all the emails I get.
I respond to some, but the ideas are fantastic.
And you can send those to DanielMillerSWAJ DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
And I love to hear those.
So diving in today, I want to take a look at one that a lot of people contacted me about.
And it's a theme or an idea.
Some people express anger and frustration about it.
Again, I am a trauma resolution practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, and this is another one of the topics that some folks really struggle with.
Some people, though, are just sort of confused about it.
They want clarity on what it means.
They just don't understand it.
And it goes something like this, and this is one that could go a lot of different directions.
We can certainly blow past the kind of time we spend on these episodes.
But it's basically the notion that we live in a fallen world, or we live in a sinful world, and more important than just that notion itself is, what does that mean?
And the question I always want to ask is, what does it do within religious communities, right?
These kinds of things that we're decoding, that's what that decoding is, is to look and say, look, we say these things, and here's what they mean, or the surface meaning, however you want to think of that.
But what do they do?
What are they really doing?
What work are they doing for religious communities when they're expressed?
And this is one of those that I want to take a look with.
And I wanted to begin with the basics, okay?
Because there may be those of you who are listening for whom this language of fallenness or sinfulness is just kind of weird.
And not everybody who listens grew up in one of these traditions and left it.
A lot of people didn't.
And maybe you're trying to make sense of friends or family or others who say these things.
So, when Christians say that the world is fallen, they're expressing the classical Christian view that the created order has, quote-unquote, fallen from its status as God defined it.
It's the idea that God created everything and it was good, but then disobedience or sinfulness sort of enters into the world and ruptures this relationship with God, and that is the, quote-unquote, the fall.
And so when we say that the world is fallen or defined by fallenness, that's what we mean is that there's this kind of brokenness to it in terms of relation with God.
And it can take a more kind of moral-sounding tone when we say that the world is sinful or rebellious, right?
We live in a fallen world.
Now, all kinds of Christians I'm sure people could find exceptions to this, but all kinds of Christians, generally speaking, they're going to affirm this notion somehow, whether they're liberal or conservative or Catholic or Protestant or whatever, they're going to profess some sense of the world's fallenness.
And why?
Because like lots of religious traditions, Christianity is going to hold that there is Something about the human condition that needs to be remedied, right?
And this is part of the Christian answer of how it is that that something came to be out of whack and why it needs to be remedied, right?
This notion of fallenness.
So, all Christians are going to affirm something like this, but they have historically interpreted this really, really differently.
Really different senses of what it means to say that the world has fallen.
And these differences are also reflected in contemporary practice and in the nuts and bolts of contemporary politics and culture wars and all those kinds of things reflect these differences.
So here are some general patterns.
And again, if people want to take exception to this and email me, you can.
Are there exceptions?
Of course there are.
But some general patterns Traditionally, Catholics have been more open than Protestants to the idea that the world can be meaningfully reformed or redeemed from its fallenness.
That, yes, the world has fallen, but that we can take steps to sort of redeem it or make it better.
Protestants Placed more emphasis on the relative what they would call the depravity of the world or it's sort of incapacity for redemption.
The world is fallen and that's just how it is and there's nothing that can be done until eventually the final judgment and things like that.
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