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The Other Side of Sin Rating: 10/10 Review: I absolutely loved this book. It is a collection of essays by nine theologians. I will say one bad thing about it up front, Mr. Park should have someone edit his writing much more carefully. It sounds like the writing of someone who speaks English as a second language at times. You can understand what he has to say without difficulty, but I found it very distracting. Never the less, this book is outstanding. It is deep, insightful and I found it riveting to read. Okay, it is a book on Theology, so how riveting can it be? Very. In the course of my personal development I reached a new insight, we are all sinners, but also, we have all been sinned against. There is present here a paired opposite of a sort, we are sinner and the victim of sin. I became fascinated by this reality and its implications. I had never really heard anyone in the church discuss this rather obvious fact, well, it took me 54 years to notice it. I purposefully set out to see what I could find written on this subject, and my search led to this book. The authors are quick to point out that for 2000 years the church has focused on the fact that we are sinners and completely ignored the reality that we are all sinned against. They take this topic and expand on it greatly. The essays seem to move from the personal out to the broader societal context. I was impressed by the idea of "han" as described by Park. Han is a word that describes how people feel who are chronically sinned against by the conditions in which they live. I found the chapter by Ched Myers on public addiction totally fascinating. This book was written before any of the recent economic melt downs. This chapter prophetically depicts how an addiction to consumerism can land an entire society, even world, in an economic disaster. He uses Platinga's characteristics of addiction then lines these up with the qualities of personal and societal addiction to consumerism pointing out the predicted consequences. His predictions looking now from the vantage of early 2010 are rather stunning and point up our lack of awareness as to how addicted we have become to consumerism. There is an excellent chapter by Walter Brueggermann on the Old Testament nature of sin; Andrew Sung Park writes about the eastern concept of Han; Justo L Gonzalez writes on the concept of "alienation of alienation"; Susan Nelson recognizes that we are all sinners, but also we are sinned against, she expands on this discussion greatly and brings it to a practical level discussing shame and the broken heart; Ched Meyers discusses public addiction using consumerism as his focus; Theodore Jennings, Jr discusses a new reconstruction of sin; Marie Fortune discusses sin with regard to sexuality and has marvelous insight and experience we should all hear; and it concludes with Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore's chapter on teaching "justice and reconciliation in a wounding world" where she expresses our need to learn to deal with symbols and uncertainty more effectively. These are very brief bullets of very worthy discussions. I highly recommend this book. When I looked at the reviews of it on Amazon.com they were very negative. Obviously, there are folk who have some disagreements with these ideas as they are expressed. Here is my idea about this, the church has become stuck. We need these very ideas to move forward, and more. These essays begin to capture where we need to go. Of course, there are many who are quite happy to be where we are. For me, where we are just doesn't work anymore. There are deeper and richer understandings about God, sin, our existence, we need to move the Church forward. Their ideas are just the beginning. Consider what they have to say, take a chance to begin seeing life differently. God is leading us forward. All opinions are mine and mine alone. Curtis Climer |
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