Word: sin
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...world, and especially American, "failure." James Reston, the Times's Washington bureau chief, could contain his pent-up disdain for President Eisenhower no longer and dashed off a classic column of political satire. And Syndicated Columnist Joseph Alsop donned sackcloth in public and did penance for the venial sin of optimism...
This sociological-psychological fact, thinks Teacher Goldstein, a nondenominational Protestant, has profound theological results. Insecure and anxious like most men, theologians (there has never been a woman theologian of note) tend to equate the restless self-concern that results from this state with sin, and to extol the opposite (feminine) qualities of quiet, self-surrendering passivity. Such theologians as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sweden's Anders Nygren and Israel's Martin Buber see man as estranged from himself and from God and filled with anxiety because of his estrangement; that anxiety, in their view, results in sins...
...necessarily woman's. Experiencing more security and less anxiety than men, women find it easier "to enter into loving relationships in which self-concern is at a minimum." Instead of masculine pride and will to power, women have their own "specifically feminine forms of sin ... outgrowths of the basic feminine character structure" and "suggested by such items as triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one's own self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence; inability to respect the boundaries of privacy; sentimentality, gossipy sociability, and mistrust...
...problem, says Teacher Goldstein, is important for men as well as women, because society as a whole is growing more and more feminine. If the 19th century U.S. was a masculine society of private enterprisers and empire builders -egotists to whom opportunism and ornery behavior were no sin-the modern U.S. rates teamwork and sociability high virtues. It is a world in which the in dividual is expected to play a relatively more passive role within the group...
...Goldstein feels that theologians are not taking sufficient account of this sociological fact, that they are still attacking an oldfashioned, masculine form of sin, instead of redefining their "categories of sin and redemption" to meet the new situation. "For a feminine society will have its own special potentialities for good and evil, to which a theology based solely on masculine experience may well be irrelevant." She offers no specific suggestions for a female theology of the future, but perhaps what lies ahead is a theology of enlightened self-esteem emphasizing the final words of Christ's commandment: "Thou shalt...