Jack Lewis, meet Matt Fox for an original blessing

Jack Lewis meet Matt Fox ... Matt, this is Jack. Matt, you may recall Jack by his nom de plume: CS Lewis. Now, I've brought you two together because you have both influenced me in a congruent way. I know it may be hard to believe, one of you apparently defending a Christian tradition that the other has found deeply alienating. Yet, actually I learnt a particular something from both of you and I find myself wondering how best to tell a story of human corruption against that background.

So, what is that particular something? Well, from you, Matt, I became convinced that we really do need to make sure that we tell the story starting with original blessing rather than making original sin the main and key point in our thinking. I became convinced mainly because that is where the Hebrew and therefore Christian scriptures begin; with "And God saw that it was good". But this is also where you come in, Jack. Because I had learnt something from you already which, over time, I realised was deeply congruent with the idea of original blessing. From you I had learnt in my undergraduate reading, that we must understand evil as derived, unoriginal and merely parasitic on the Good. Evil cannot be thought of in a dualistic way as somehow 'being' an equal and opposite force to 'good'. Your reasoning convinced me that behind every evil is a perverted or misused good; that evil is, in a sense a parasite feeding off what is good and unable to exist without goodness.

In this, I think, you are both united. Reality is fundamentally good and we are called to participate in that fundamental goodness, and indeed to tend it and help multiply it. This is our human calling before any other calling: to be blessed and to bless in turn. I actually think both of you would probably agree with that, in broad terms, leaving aside quibbles about terminology or which metaphors might be most apt and resonant.

What I want to do with this conversation is think about where we go next in terms of accounting for what has tended in the Christian tradition to be called 'sin'. Though, to be sure, there have been and are other terms for it and a variety of images to think it through.

You see, I think that a further dimension of what I think Matt has got right in all this is to be critical of where the fall-redemption model, as he tends to call it, sometimes (indeed, often) pushes Christians and those influenced by that way of thinking. On the other hand, what you, Jack, do really well in so many of your books is explore the inner world of sinning in a way that helps us to see how sinning is a non-dualistic thing. It's not an alien force that takes us over so much as a directing of drives and desires that in other circumstances and dealt with differently would be simply an ordinary good. What you also do is help us to see that there is a fundamental surdity about it. These things would sit well enough, I suspect, with the fundamental right insight behind the idea of original blessing.

So, in future blog posts, I hope to try to tease this out a bit further: what is sin in a non-dualistic account, recognising that so much popular thinking about sin is at root dualistic, I think that may be what you were saying, Matt. I don't recall you saying that Jack, but as I indicate above, I think that your approach amounted to that.