There is a school of thought in moral theology that lends itself to calculation of culpability. If you press someone on this, they’ll deny it, but it’s hard to avoid as a practical outgrowth of this school of thought.
That school of thought or subculture talks about things like invincible ignorance. If you didn’t know something was wrong, and there wasn’t a reasonable way for you to have learned that it’s wrong, then you’re not culpable for it, even though the damage done by that action is real. If you didn’t know something was wrong, but the reason you don’t know is because you plugged your ears and said “LA LA LA” any time someone tried to tell you, then you are culpable.
Sin is a free choice. So if you aren’t free to choose it, it isn’t a sin. But your freedom is impeded by things like a threat of danger, or being exhausted, or being overwhelmed; how often do we say things we regret simply because it just kind of slipped out in a very heated moment? Isn’t this different from carefully considering our words and deliberately saying the same thing?
Well, yes. These distinctions are important; it’s good to know that if I spill hot coffee on someone because I got bumped versus out of cruelty, God will judge that differently. But it can lead to a kind of culpability calculation, which I think is detrimental to true repentance. It goes like this:
Well, I shouldn’t confess things that aren’t sins. And I yelled at someone the other day. That’s a sin, right? Well, I hadn’t gotten to bed before 3 a.m. for more than a week, and that person was laughing at me, and I kept trying to step away from the situation so I could regroup and refocus on the right thing to do, but I also couldn’t figure out what the right thing to do was, and the yelling just sort of happened. I didn’t choose to do it. So, was it a sin? Maybe I am not culpable because of the situation I was in; I mean, I was definitely trying to manage it the right way and it was more than I could handle. Well, if I had built better habits to begin with, maybe… okay, so maybe it was like 43 percent my fault and 57 percent because of circumstances? But I’m not actually sure what other habits I could have been building; it was such a weird situation.
And on and on, and it’s a problem, because it doesn’t seem right to accept all the blame as if you had deliberately chosen to do it, but the priest doesn’t want you to confess things that aren’t sins, and he will definitely get annoyed if you try to explain it to him. I think we can all recognize that there’s something wrong with this line of thinking, but what exactly is wrong with it? And for those who are prone to it, how do we stop?
I think we need to stop thinking about culpability.
If you’re out walking and someone comes around the corner really quickly and you bump into them, normally you apologize and help them pick up the things that fell out of their bag, even though it was definitely not your fault. (Credit to my husband for this analogy.) And I think we can take the same approach with God and sin.
Look, you yelled at someone. You regret it; you wish you hadn’t done it. You feel bad about it. You don’t want to be the kind of person who loses control and yells at people, but here you are; you just did that exact thing, and somebody got hurt. What do you do with that? You don’t like this about yourself, and you want to stop, but you don’t know how. Or maybe you do know how (or think you know), and you’ve been trying to stop, but you can’t. Not being this kind of person is a daunting task, probably an insurmountable one. Furthermore, you don’t want to have hurt anyone, but you did, so now you want to repair the damage you’ve done — another daunting and possibly insurmountable task. You’re willing to do what you can, but you recognize that you can’t do enough. You need help; specifically, you need God’s grace.
This is more or less the content of an Act of Contrition and the requirements for a valid confession — and the grace that you need is what God offers in the sacrament.
Culpability is a real thing, but I think many of us could benefit by thinking about it less. When we try to calculate culpability, we aren’t preparing for repentance; we’re sorting out what percentage of our action we should feel crushing shame about and what percentage we can just disregard. Neither of those is a good attitude toward wrongdoing. Regardless of your culpability, it matters that you become the kind of person that doesn’t yell like this, because this kind of yelling hurts people. (And for what it’s worth, when the Act of Contrition prayer speaks of offending or hurting God, recall that God is most present in people who are suffering. Their suffering is his suffering — see Mt. 25:31-46.)
So you can go to confession and say, “I yelled at someone, and I’m sorry.” You can affirm your desire and intention to do better in the future and ask for God’s grace to help. You can trust in the power of the words of absolution. You can ask God to heal anyone you have hurt by your yelling, and you can make an effort toward that healing — by praying for that person, apologizing to them, taking initiative in repairing the relationship. That’s repentance. And you don’t need a culpability calculator to get there.
Good point. When we stop making excuses for ourselves, we grow a little more toward maturity.