Moral Theology of Pope John Paul II (Moral Traditions Series) Book

This is a difficult and profound book. I read Part One with great interest, but really I skimmed Part Two which contains the heavily detailed exegesis on the theories of Part One. In this respect, I think that the writer of the Foreward is just plain wrong when he says that one should read chapter one and then go directly to Part Two. It is chapter one and the other chapters of Part One that are most directly engaging to a non-theologian, non-academic reader.

I have been stuck on the doctrine of original sin for many, many years. And I found mimetic theory and its anthropology to be a fascinating structure for viewing this doctrine and our human heritage. What I most appreciated was Mr. Alison's "retro-analysis" of the problem of original sin. That is, he begins with the revelations/unveilings to the apostolic witnesses that the Resurrection of Jesus caused. In this sense, he presents the unfolding of doctrine as actually the unfolding of experience. Just lovely. From this vantage point of the Resurrection, Mr. A. works back to the apostolic realization of the mimetic nature of human behavior and its involvement with death and violence. Then, my mind comes to Mr. A's point about God's indifference to death as opposed to our cultural obsession, as it were, with it. Last, I come to the point of the liberation that the book teaches: The Resurrection of Jesus shows that our forgiveness is ultimately our freedom from the obsession and the violence caused by our misapprehension of how we can or should behave. That is, we learn to see, to realize the nature of our mimetic behavior and its violence and can have the grace, if you will, to leave it behind. I will quote just a little from page 119: ". . . we can see that the only way we are able to appreciate our true condition as humans-marked-by-death is precisely as it is revealed to us that that condition is unnecessary. It is in this way that the doctrine of original sin is the culmination of the revealed understanding of being human: the shape of divine forgiveness revealed in the resurrection of Jesus shows itself to stretch into our congenital involvement with death. The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine of the un-necessity of death."