Transcript a powerpoint presentation on this chapter

The Self, Society
& Social Sin
Bernard Connor
Bernard Connor
• 1938-1999
• Born Sussex, to SA as OP student 1964
• Moral theology degrees from Edinburgh,
California & Natal
• Theology of social morality huge influence
on SA Bishops Conference
• Seminary lecturer, student chaplain
• Editor of RC journal Grace & Truth (19801992)
Theology of Social Sin
• Dehumanising social conditions e.g.
racisim, sexism, militarism, poverty,
political oppression, consumerism
• Doctorate Sin Self & Society: A
Theological Investigation into Structural
Evil
• Social structures an analytical category
with ethical standards
• Moral agency & responsibility of the self
A Double Hermeneutic
• Inductive ethics, from experience not abstract
principles, dominant in SA
• Sociological structural approach seemed too
deductive for some liberation theologians
• Connor took middle ground: dialogue
– of victims & social scientists
– from below & above
– ‘experience near’ practice & ‘experience distant’
theory
– nature & grace
• Drawing on Anthony Giddens’ work on social sin
Personal & Social Sin
• More than personal behaviour hardening into
social attitudes
• Social structures link members, so are the
medium as well as outcome
• Like a building, each social structure constrains
& enhances, enables & disables human action:
– perverted spaces “open up the lines of action that
harm & close off those that would bring good”
• Social sin calls for responsibility
– for the present & future, not guilt for the past
– like personal sin, acknowledged only when being
overcome
Social Images
• IT enables multiplication & manipulation of images which
people use to interact
– we need these images to have a shared vision of the world
– but they can be distorted, used to legitimise dehumanising social
conditions
– like blindness – blocking off parts of reality from consciousness,
blinding people to the immorality of their action
– people are still responsible: choice to be complicit or not
“Both everyone & no-one appears to be guilty. This, in turn,
makes it hard to say who, if anyone, should repent &
make recompense, & how this might be done
constructively.”
Social Evil
• Reification of social sin:
– evil is perceived as intrinsic to a group of people or
social structure
– not the case: sin is the absence of good (inter)action,
not a force in itself
– “Social structures are not apart from the people
occupying them”; they are inside people’s actions,
both beneficiaries & victims
– So replacing leaders of a distorted regime e.g.
apartheid, poverty of globalisation is not enough; the
distorted consciousness needs to change
Structuration of Social Sin
• Advanced technology
= advanced control over society & nature
= more complex structural sin
• Today even hunger is socially mediated:
“Whether people obtain enough to eat or not depends
today upon whether there is an adequate supply of
foodstuffs, an adequate & just system for distributing it to
drought-stricken regions, freedom from corruption &
black market practices, a programme aimed at full
employment & what priorities governments have in their
spending.”
• Defective root metaphor: society as machine
– blind economic forces a myth – freedom to be responsible
– just as the self cannot exist without society, society cannot exist
without human action & decision
Reconciliation
• De-structuring of social sin a process,
where grace enters in
• Sacrament of reconciliation not enough for
social processes:
– responds to personal guilt
– grace to individuals apart from social
structures regulating their actions
– reconciling with God & Church, not society
Kingdom of God
• A metaphor for destructuring of social sin, making way
for re-gracing of society
• Bible does not give a political & economic programme of
action, but values
• Kingdom a transformative symbol of:
– encounter with God, the self, & society
– standards of justice & liberation to measure society by
• Jesus uses it in gospels
– to contrast with the conditions of the time
– to assume what is good & redeem what is bad
• Shows there are alternatives to the status quo,
enabling a new way of imagining reality