Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin

Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin. By Alistair McFadyen. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine Series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii + 255 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $23.00 (paper).

This book explores the Augustinian understanding of sin as the bondage of the will, arguing that this provides a better key to understanding human social pathologies than does either the therapeutic model (that severs such pathology from any notion of personal responsibility) or the moralistic model (that assumes that, inasmuch as we are persons at all, our wills are autonomous and therefore free). For McFadyen, these are false alternatives. We may be personally implicated in an evil (contributing to it by our own acts of will) without willing the evil per se. This is clearly the case, he argues, with child abuse, where the child, threatened with punishment if she divulges the truth, survives by consenting to the abuser's construction of reality. Under these conditions, the child's exercise of will reinforces at every turn the rule of self-abnegation and misrepresentation, so that she may experience herself in retrospect as having "asked for it." She never willed the abuse in an absolute sense, yet within the parameters of the abusive relationship, she was constrained to will it in a relative sense. To deny her voluntary participation would be to discount the intensely personal dimension of her involvement; to blame her for it would be to discount the lack of freedom that accompanied this exercise of will. So we cannot begin to understand the experience of abuse unless we assert that (1) personhood and will are inseparable, (2) the will's innate aiming for the good can be constantly deflected in the direction of evil, and (3) who we are as persons cannot be separated from our complicity in abuse, even when we did not offer free consent to it in the first place.

For McFadyen, these assertions reflect the traditional Christian understanding of original sin. The system of threats and lies established by the abuser ensures that every act of will serves the preservation of that system as an end in itself. Child abuse is thus an instance of idolatry, or, rather, of the way in which false gods, once established, can compel otherwise innocent victims to worship them. Likewise, according to classical Christian teaching, the human race finds itself hopelessly entangled in a skein of half-truths and persistent fears, before which the will finds itself unable to turn from idols to the living God, even when it wants to. As McFadyen points out, however, the solution lies not in the achievement of a will which is autonomous and essentially disengaged (as if we ever possessed such a will in the first place), but the achievement of the only true freedom vouchsafed to us, namely, to fall in love with the true God, who never uses (let alone abuses) us, but loves us and enjoys us for ourselves.

Along with its careful development of this argument (including a helpful analysis of the Holocaust as an example of how perpetrators construct a system of abuse), this book offers an excellent analysis of Augustine's doctrine of the will. It also provides a surprisingly fresh and appreciative overview of feminist literature as it relates to the topic of sin.

THOMAS E. BREIDENTHAL

The General Theological Seminary New York City

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2002
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