With Fear and Trembling

Paul Griffiths’s Decreation has some harrowing passages about sin. Like this one:

“What will be left of me when I am no longer a sinner? That is a question fundamental to trembling before hell’s presence in the devastation [i.e., the fallen world]. Such trembling, however, like all well-formed Christian responses, can undergo malformation, and the most common malformation of trembling is despair, and its concomitant, scrupulosity. Those who despair of avoiding hell typically do so because they seem to themselves to be subject to repeated sin without hope of escape: they lie or blaspheme or torture or gossip again and again, without apparent end or amelioration; they commit adultery or fornication or murder or torture or gluttony in the same way; they see this, they see the results of it – their progressive self-damage and the concomitant damage of others, their progress toward nothing, the increasingly thickness and density of the veil between the LORD’s face and their own – and trembling becomes the only response available to them. Sin is then hyperreal, its glamour outshining what is also always there, which is the beauty of glory’s traces and heaven’s anticipation. They despair before that glamour, and become hyperscrupulous in the sense that the weight of their sin is so heavy on them, its burdens so unmanageable, that they cannot turn to the means of grace.”

In sum: “Trembling that removes hope is malformed, as is hope without trembling. Their union, each moderated by the other, is an appropriate response to hell’s presence in the devastation” (320).