Why go on?

Q-96 - Rev dear Rev: If Christ has redeemed us from death and sin, then how is it that we keep on sinning?

Magic. A magical Quaesitum and very helpful to budding young Pauline theologians, offering insight into the modern minds that pick up Bibles, but also revealing if one might be so bold not a little magic in the assumptions of the retro-scena behind the Question, but I digress. But still it ill behoves us to ignore the assumptions of such a Question since when we delineate those unspoken assumptions, some subtle solution arises toward an Answer to such a Quaesitum:

1. It evinces an External and Extrinsicist Concept of Redemption;

2. There are traces within of a charismatic numinosity over-riding the doctrine of free will;

3. There is present behind the Quaesitum an impatience to get the job done re the human race;

4. No distinction arises between the Redemption as a cosmic force and sin as hamartia;

5. There is also no concept of the Redemption in Potentia and the Redemption in Actu.

So altogether summarised, the Question posits the problem in modern times of Supernaturalist Charismatics for whom the Redemption is a Global Event but there is no moment for personal and individual appropriation of that Event in the lives of many people and many Christians. There are 3 Theories about the Redemption generally abroad and at large in much charismatic writing:

1. Historicist Redemption - The Christ-Event is merely historical, no modern outreach;

2. Justificatory Redemption - The Christ-Event automatically justifies all believers at the stroke of a pen, no need for Sacraments;

3. Annihilation Redemption - The Christ-Event substitutes for the free will of the believer.

So the Quaesitum assumes an Annihilation notion of Redemption wherein the Christ Event kills off the very freedom of the human race that the coming of the messiah classically assumes in the older kind of Thomistic tomes, one result maybe too of another theory of the origins of the Christ Event. Part of the problem of the Question is that the believer as such might be reading from their Bible and especially repeated passages from the Letter of St Paul to the Romans which are however unspeakably obscure and subtle for the modern secular mind seeking meaning while opening the pages of their English Bibles. The truth is not so obvious and indeed is much more subtle than that.

But anyway, such are the common assumptions of this line of reasoning. It is theological, it is spiritual, but it is not altogether a manifestation of the one true apostolic faith of Jesus and his apostles for whom it was one thing to accept the Redemption of the Christ Event as an historical abstract and global Event, quite another to accept it and appropriate it as a personal choice. Newman would concur. Nice question.