From Adam Miller and his book ‘Original Grace’:
If grace is original, why do I sin?
I’ve been showing old movies to my teenage boys. We’ve watched a whole mix of things like Casablanca, Yojimbo, Arsenic and Old Lace, A Fist Full of Dollars, Harvey, The Maltese Falcon, Planet of the Apes, Roman Holiday, and a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock films like The Birds, To Catch a Thief and Rear Window. My favorite Hitchcock movie, though, is North by Northwest. Cary Grant plays mild mannered executive who’s mistaken for a government agent. Hounded by foreign spies, he goes on the run and gets tangled up with Eva Marie Saint. From there, Hitchcock steadily ratchets up the tension until the heroes are running for their lives across the face of Mount Rushmore.
But the thing I love most about this movie is its twist: the government agent, the international man of mystery for whom Grant has been mistaken, doesn’t exist. The agent is a fiction created by the powers that be. He’s a fabrication, an elaborate misdirection, a ruse meant to fool our enemies and lead them on a wild goose chase. And it works—too well for Grant’s sake. But perhaps most remarkably, by the movie’s end, the foreign spies aren’t the only ones who’ve fallen for this con. By movie’s end, Grant has fallen for it too. Furthermore, by harrowing circumstances into the role he’s been assigned to play, Grant stops acting like a mild mannered an executive, starts acting like an international spy, and —with Eva Marie Saint’s help—saves the day.
The movie is electric, and deserves its place in the pantheon. But as a philosopher I keep coming back to the irony at the heart of the story. And in particular, I keep coming back to the exceptional twist Hitchcock gives this irony: once he’s accused of being a spy, Grant can’t resist the temptation to mistake himself for someone who doesn’t exist.
And this, it seems to me, is an excellent description of what it’s like to be a sinner. As a sinner, I continually mistake myself for someone who doesn’t exist. With oscillating fervor, I mistake myself for a loser who deserves to suffer or a winner who deserves to be loved.
In one of my father’s first “love Grams,” he wonders aloud about how to write what he needs to write. He doesn’t have a better idea than sending group texts, but twenty person group texts, it turns out, are an awkward format for saying what needs to be said, “Wow!” he began one text, “How do I make my point in two paragraphs, or so?” Sometimes my father’s texts wander, and sometimes they never quite reach their destination. But sometimes, as in this instance, he cuts right to it. “Look in the mirror,” he wrote in September 2018, “and see the problem—you.” My father granted this was a hard statement” but still insisted that “no one can come unto Christ until they take ownership for who they are.”The willingness to see the truth about yourself, he concluded, ” is the first step to becoming who Cod created you to be.”1
As a sinner, I continually misread the world. I misread everything in terms of what’s deserved. I believe in myths like original sin. (I mistake God for someone who doesn’t exist (a punisher). I mistake myself for someone who doesn’t exist. Someone who deserves—or not— to be punished). And I mistake the world for something that it isn’t (a punishment or reward).
This is what the logic of original sin does. This is the spell its accusations cast. This is the story it peddles. And when I buy into this logic, I buy into the idea that I ought to be someone who deserves something. But this logic is itself the problem. And, ultimately, their’s only one antidote for thinking that I’m someone who deserves something, good or bad. I must look in the mirror and confront what the scriptures call my “nothingness.”
Only this nothingness can break sin’s spell and dissolve my pride.
If God has awakened you to a sense of your ‘nothingness,” Benjamin tells his people, then good news: the Spirit of the Lord is upon you. Now, for the sake of retaining this remission of sins, he urges them, I would that ye should remember, and always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God, and your own nothingness” (Mosiah 4:5, 11).
We need only worry about Benjamin’s insistence on our nothingness if we accept the logic of original sin. It would only be catastrophic for me to deserve nothing if everything depended on my Managing to deserve something. But if the whole logic of punishments and rewards is too limited to capture the truth about this world, then the fact that I deserve nothing is more proof that this logic of punishment and rewards was wrong all along. Sin had misframed reality, misunderstood justice, and misjudged the nature of God’s love from the start.
In Benjamin’s view, our nothingness is good news. In fact, in Benjamin’s view our nothingness is an inseparable part of the good news. Our nothingness reveals God’s grace, and in addition it proves that grace to be original. ~ Adam S. Miller, Original Grace (Deseret Book, BYU Maxwell Institute, 2022), p.65-8 (continued see “Nothingness ll”)
