7 Sin in Historical Theology. Gerald Bray
GERALD BRAY
There is no subject of greater importance to Christian theology than its understanding of the concept of sin and its effects. That may seem like an odd statement to make, but if we think about what the Christian gospel is, we shall quickly see why this is so. The gospel is a message of salvation from sin, achieved for us by Jesus Christ. To do that, he became sin for us, although he was himself sinless, and gave us his Holy Spirit so that we might be able to overcome sin and its effects in our own lives. Had there been no sin to begin with, there would have been no gospel and no Christianity because they would not have been necessary. Paradoxical as it sounds, sin and its consequences are the immediate cause of the coming of Christ into the world and of the work that he has done on our behalf. For that reason, we need to know what sin is in order to understand what that work accomplished. Just as a disease cannot be cured unless it is properly diagnosed, so salvation has no meaning unless we understand what it is that we have been saved from and why salvation is necessary in the first place. Knowing the nature and effects of sin is the essential preliminary to understanding what Christ did to defeat it. If we get that wrong, our appreciation of salvation will be distorted and the gospel will be lost. Understanding sin is not enough in itself to save us, but it can be said with complete certainty that failure to understand it will ensure that we shall never come to the knowledge of Christ and his salvation that God wants us to have.
Jewish and Gentile Concepts of Sin
From the beginning, the Christian church had an understanding of sin that it had inherited from Judaism. A Jew in the time of Jesus would normally have thought of sin primarily as disobedience to the law of Moses contained in the Old Testament. This law had many ramifications, but for most people it was essentially a matter of maintaining ritual purity. To eat nonkosher foods or to socialize with non-Jewish people was sinful because such things challenged the boundary markers that set Jews apart from others and maintained their identity as the people of God. Thoughtful Jews understood that there was much more to the law than that, but there was a strong tendency to objectify the commandments and find ways of keeping them according to the letter, if not always according to the spirit, in which they were originally given. That much is clear from the teaching of Jesus, which is echoed in the letters of the apostle Paul. Modern attempts to recover an appreciation of the spiritual nature of first-century Judaism do not negate this perspective, because both Jesus and Paul recognized the law’s spiritual character. They were not criticizing their fellow Jews for honoring the law as the answer to sin but for tailoring it to what they could accomplish and ignoring its deeper implications.
The message of Jesus was that the principles of the law must be internalized in the heart and mind of the believer. It was not enough to refrain from murdering other people; it was also necessary to expunge every thought that might tend toward malice and hatred of others (Matt. 5:21–22). As the apostle Paul later put it: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). Because of this, the early Christians were taught that the Mosaic law, which was intended to bring blessing to God’s people, had become instead a curse, because every time the law put its finger on human sinfulness, the urge to rebel sprang up and took over the minds of those who were subjected to it (Rom. 7:7–9). Sinfulness was latent in every human being from the fall of Adam onward, but the law gave it a focus and so made it more dangerous. Furthermore, although the law could do a brilliant job of pointing out what sin was, it had no power to overcome it. As a result, it was a message of condemnation rather than of salvation, and those Jews who thought they could keep it were only fooling themselves. A Jew who became a Christian had to stop thinking of the law as a way of salvation and see that, by its very holiness, it was a way of condemnation instead.
How hard it was for many Jewish Christians to abandon that way of thinking can be seen from the struggles between them and the Gentiles in the early church. Non-Jewish converts had no sense of obligation toward a Jewish law that many of them found bizarre and distressingly unspiritual in its focus on such things as circumcision and food laws. In dealing with this conflict, Paul had to tread a careful pathway between two extremes. On the one hand, he could not accept the Jewish argument that the law could and should be kept in every detail, but neither could he simply abandon it, as the Gentiles apparently wished. He compromised by coming up with the notion of the “weaker brother,” which in its original use meant primarily a Jewish Christian who was unable to abandon the law and the ingrained prejudices that it nurtured. Paul advised the Gentiles to treat such people gently and with great consideration, but on the principle of the matter he clearly sided with the Gentiles and agreed with their understanding of the true nature of sin.
What was that understanding? The Gentile converts we meet in the New Testament had inherited a number of different conceptions of sin, none of which had any direct connection with the law of Moses. Many of them came to Christ with notions of ritual purity derived from their native pagan cults, and some of their ideas became influential in the Christian church, especially if they could be harmonized with authentic biblical teaching. The more intellectual Gentiles had also inherited philosophical concepts of good and evil that were rather different from Jewish teachings about these things, and these often had to be modified in order to fit the Christian gospel. As the church became more Gentile and less Jewish in composition, the influence of such Gentile beliefs became more prominent, and it would not be too much to say that the doctrine of sin developed by the fathers of the church was in essence an attempt to bring Graeco-Roman ideas about sin into line with the teaching of the Bible.
Gentiles whose concept of sin was closely tied to ritual purity often thought of this in ways unknown to Judaism. The classic example of this was the attitude toward virginity and celibacy that was characteristic of ancient Rome. There, virginity was highly prized in the pagan cult of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, and to defile one of her priestesses was a terrible sin. It was easy for Romans who came from that background to think that celibacy was a sign of purity and that sexual intercourse was in itself a sin, something that was quite foreign to Judaism. This idea crept into the Christian church in spite of its pagan origins because although Judaism promoted marriage and procreation, there was undoubtedly a certain preference given to celibacy in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 7; see also Rev. 14:4). Of course, the reasons for this had nothing to do with ritual purity, and the apostle Paul was careful to insist that those who married did not sin in doing so, but his caution in this matter could easily be overlooked by people who were already inclined to favor celibacy for other reasons. They could use the apostle’s stated preference for it as a justification for allowing their paganism to intrude on Christian practice, and they did so, even to the point where it became the preferred norm, although the church never went to the extreme of condemning sexual intercourse within the bond of marriage.
Gentiles were also more inclined than Jews to think of sin in connection with material existence. Many of them believed that human beings were immortal souls that had been trapped in material bodies and become corrupted because of it. To their minds, sinfulness was the inevitable consequence of human finitude, and the only way to escape it was to be reintegrated into the spiritual reality from which the immortal souls of men had separated. These Gentiles did not distinguish clearly between creation and the fall, a confusion of concepts that is completely contrary to the teaching of Genesis. In the Bible, creation is good because it has been made by God, and sin is an unnatural corruption of that. Getting this message across to Gentiles was one of the most difficult tasks the early church faced, but it was a necessary preliminary to preaching the gospel. If finitude had been sinful in itself, the incarnation of the Son of God would have been impossible, and the resurrection of the body would have been a contradiction in terms. The Christian doctrine of sin had to be cast evangelistically in order to address a Gentile audience that needed to understand the biblical worldview before it could accept the gospel message of salvation.
Sin and the Created Order
It should therefore come as no surprise to discover that the biblical passage most frequently commented on in the early church was Genesis 1–3, which is the account of the creation, sin, and fall of mankind. Virtually every church father wrote at length on this foundational text, and some did so more than once. Augustine of Hippo, who did not write many commentaries on the Bible, nevertheless penned no fewer than four treatises on this subject, which gives us a good indication of how important it was to him.1 Despite their many apparent differences, the general drift of these treatises is the same. Augustine says that creation is good, that sin is a corruption or distortion of that original goodness, and that once sin has occurred there is no way to get rid of it other than by divine intervention. However sorry we may be for it, however hard we may try to put it right, however much we may desire to be sinless, none of this is possible without the grace of God freely given to us in the person of his Son Jesus Christ. Only by dying spiritually to the forces of this world and by being born again in Christ can a human being overcome the power of sin in his life and hope to inherit the kingdom of God.
As it was understood by the church fathers, sin is a condition we have inherited from our first parents, Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God in the garden of Eden and were expelled from it for that reason. But if their sin was their own fault, it was not their own idea. Above and beyond the sin of the first human beings was a power of evil that had lured them into it by temptation. This power was personified in Satan and his angels, who had rebelled against God at some point before the creation of the world. Why God did not immediately destroy them, and why Satan was allowed to tempt mankind into following him in his rebellion, were mysteries that no one could solve, although it was clear that they corresponded to human experience. To be cleansed from sin was therefore to enter into spiritual warfare with Satan, the prince of evil, who continues to do everything in his power to tempt us back into his kingdom. In the end, Satan will be destroyed, but until he is, evil will be a reality with which we shall have to contend and against which we shall need to be protected. This does not make it inevitable that a Christian will sin, but it is a reminder that our innate sinfulness comes from the fact that we have been born into the kingdom of Satan and that sinfulness continues to expose us to the dangers inherent in the Devil’s temptations. Even though we have been set free from the power of sin, our natural inclinations continue to make it appear attractive to us and serve as a reminder that we cannot do without the saving power of Christ.
What exactly is sinfulness, as opposed to the sinful acts we commit? Following the pagan Greek tendency to equate sinfulness with finitude, many of the church fathers thought of it as a weakness inherent in our human constitution. To their minds evil was a lack, an absence, or a deprivation of goodness that is the natural consequence of our separation from God. They reasoned that because God is the supreme good, to be cut off from him is to forfeit that goodness. The result is sin, or more precisely, a condition of sinfulness. Evil thoughts and deeds, or what we would call actual sins, are the inevitable consequence of this separation from God and feed our natural inclination to get as far away from him and his goodness as we can. Those who refuse to submit to God’s will are bent on self-destruction and will be destroyed because of it. Whether this destruction is total annihilation or eternal punishment was less clear to the fathers, but the few who discussed the matter seemed to prefer eternal punishment because it was more consistent with the nature of God. The reason for this was that God hates nothing that he has made, and therefore will preserve even the most rebellious creature in being because he loves it as one of his creatures. But keeping such souls in being is also preventing them from achieving their desire for self-destruction and is therefore felt by those souls as a torment. God is always kind and loving toward his creation, but those who have been blinded by their disobedience to him do not appreciate that and experience his love as punishment for their sinfulness, if not for their particular sins. As the apostle Paul told the Corinthians: “The natural person does not understand the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14).2
The idea that sin was essentially a lack or deprivation of good was common in the early church and remained the dominant view in the East.3 A key element of the Eastern Orthodox view is that Adam’s sin brought death into the world, and it is because of their mortality that all his descendants have sinned. They base this on their interpretation of Romans 5:12, which they read as: “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” The correctness of this translation depends on the meaning of the ambiguous Greek phrase eph’ ho, which is translated as “for which reason” by the Eastern churches but as “because” by most people in the West. Either meaning is theoretically possible, and therefore which of them is preferable needs to be determined by other criteria. For example, can we say that Adam was immortal before he fell and that sin brought mortality into the world? Everyone agrees that Adam died as a result of his sin, but that is not the same thing as saying that sin caused him to lose his original immortality. After all, Satan was immortal, but he did not lose that quality when he sinned. On the other hand, the man Jesus Christ was mortal, but that did not prevent him from being sinless as well. The relationship between sin and death therefore seems to be more complex than the Eastern Orthodox churches (or at least their more representative theologians) have allowed. Adam was not created as an immortal being, but in the garden of Eden he was protected against death. When he fell, that protection was removed and he suffered the consequences as his nature was allowed to take its course. It is therefore preferable to say that sin is the cause of death and not the other way round, as most of the Eastern fathers apparently claimed.4
The main challenge to this viewpoint in ancient times came from the pen of Augustine of Hippo, who was forced to turn his attention to it because of the teaching of Pelagius, a British monk who was making a name for himself in Rome around the year 418. Pelagius seems to have been teaching something very similar to the Eastern doctrine of sin outlined above. Like his Eastern counterparts, Pelagius refused to accept the idea that there can be such a thing as inherited guilt, although he seems to have gone further than that by denying that there is any inherited sinfulness at all. He obviously could not deny the legacy of mortality, but he seems to have dissociated this from sinfulness to the point where it was possible for someone with good intentions to save himself by his own efforts. In reaction to this, Augustine wrote a number of trenchant treatises in which he exalted the necessity of the grace of God for salvation and denied that anyone could get to God without it. Pelagianism was duly condemned by the Western church, but its influence remained strong, and even the Protestant Reformers thought it was one of the chief obstacles they had to overcome in their preaching of the gospel. This can be seen from the Augsburg Confession, which was drawn up in 1530 as the first major statement of Protestant doctrine. It says: “We condemn the Pelagians and others who deny that the original flaw is sin, and in order to dissipate the glory of the merit and of the benefits of Christ, argue that man can be declared righteous before God by the strength of his own reason.”5 The struggle against Pelagius gave a new edge to questions of sin and grace in the Western church and forced it to reconsider what sin was and how it should be dealt with in the life of the Christian. In particular, it made subsequent Western theologians, almost all of whom saw themselves as latter-day exponents of Augustine, see that in some sense at least, sin was a thing in its own right and not merely an absence of good as the Eastern churches taught.
Sin as a Stain on the Soul
One of the consequences of the Augustinian doctrine of sin and grace was a deeper interest in the atoning work of Christ on the cross. This had always been understood primarily in terms of the two natures of Christ. As Gregory of Nazianzus put it: “What has not been assumed has not been healed.”6 But once sin came to be understood as a thing that had to be removed, the notion of sacrifice came to the fore. In what way and to what extent was Christ’s death a sacrifice for sin? This was the question expounded by Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) in his great work Cur Deus Homo? Anselm explained that mankind’s sinfulness was so great that only God could deal with it. His justice required sacrifice as payment for sin, and the Son of God became a man in order to pay that price. By taking our sins upon him, Jesus Christ satisfied the demands of God’s justice and gained enough merit with God the Father to be able to pay for the sins of the entire human race. When he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he took that sacrifice with him, and there it remains as a kind of deposit and guarantee for the redemption of mankind.
In a parallel development, the Western church was coming to think of sin as a kind of congenital defect, inherited as a stain (macula in Latin) on the soul that was passed on from one generation to the next. The progress of this view can be measured by the development of the doctrine of the sinlessness of the Virgin Mary. Every Christian had always agreed that Christ was sinless, but as long as sin was understood primarily as the absence of God and his goodness, explaining this was not too difficult. A man who was also God obviously did not experience God’s absence and was therefore without sin. On the cross, he became sin for us, which can be used to explain why he expressed a sense of God’s abandonment for the first and only time in his life (Matt. 27:46 and Mark 15:34). However, if sin is thought of as a congenital defect, an entirely different problem presents itself, which may be expressed as follows: “If Jesus was a genuine human being and inherited his humanity from his mother, Mary, how was it that this humanity did not contain that defect?”
The only answer to this was to argue that at some point the defect had been removed from Mary. Most medieval theologians believed that this had occurred at the annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel declared that she was “full of grace,” which they understood to mean that she had been cleansed from her sin before conceiving Jesus in her womb (Luke 1:28). Later on, under the pressure of popular piety as much as anything else, this idea was pushed to the point of saying that Mary herself was conceived and born without sin, presumably because her mother (and father?) had been cleansed before her conception. This is the doctrine of the so-called immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which since 1854 has been the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. It should be noted, however, that it has not been accepted by the Eastern churches, in spite of their high view of Mary and her perpetual virginity. Lacking any notion of sin as a congenital defect, the Eastern Orthodox churches have no room for the Roman doctrine, which makes no sense in the context of their theology.7
Another important difference between the East and the West concerns the question of guilt for sin, to which we have already referred. The Western church believes that because sin is inherited from Adam and Eve and because they were responsible for it, we have inherited that responsibility as well as the sin itself. As Augustine put it, the human race is a massa damnata, a condemned mass whose solidarity is nowhere more apparent than in its collective guilt for its congenital sinfulness.8 The Eastern churches, on the other hand, do not accept the idea that one person can be held responsible for the sins of another. Because they believe that it is our mortality that causes us to sin and that we are not personally responsible for that, we cannot be held responsible for the sins of our ancestors but only for the sins we commit ourselves. Those who die without having sinned, like infants, therefore have no guilt before God and may be saved, whereas the medieval Western church taught that if they had not been baptized they would go to hell. It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else, that we see the serious consequences that can result from different understandings of the nature of sin.
The tendency to objectify sin and to regard it as a stain on the soul made it much easier to entertain the possibility of wiping it away, or of healing it as if it were a kind of disease. Thus we find that in the Western Middle Ages the concept of grace was developed with precisely that aim in view. Particular sins could be wiped away by applying the right amount of grace, which was understood as a cleanser or as a medicine. Baptism was the grace given to remedy original sin, which is one reason why it became so important to have babies baptized as soon as possible.9 Postbaptismal sin had been a problem in the early church, especially in North Africa, where the Donatist movement insisted that anyone who sinned after having been baptized lost his salvation forever.10 That view was rejected very early on, but the question of how to deal with postbaptismal sin remained. Augustine said that it was overcome by ongoing acts of divine grace, which were given to the regenerate soul in order to help it suppress sin and its effects. In the Middle Ages there developed an elaborate system of gradation according to which grace was dispensed in appropriate doses, mainly by means of the sacraments. This system was rooted in the primary distinction between moral sins and venial ones. Mortal sins were those which would send an impenitent person to hell, whereas venial sins were less serious and could be forgiven.11 Sins were graded in much the same way as crimes against the law and were dealt with in a similar way. An appropriate penance was devised for each sin and was administered by the priest when the penitent sinner confessed to him. Upon performance of the penance, the sinner would be absolved by the priest and admitted to Holy Communion.
It is obvious that as views of this kind took hold, there would be a correspondingly greater concentration on the nature of particular sins. One of the most popular and well-known schemes of classification is the one that defines seven deadly sins, a cluster of vices that continues to attract a certain amount of attention even today. The idea that there were seven sins that were particularly serious is supposed to go back to Gregory the Great, who enumerated them in his Moralia in Iob.12 In that great work Gregory mentioned seven vices that he thought should be particularly avoided, but he did not attempt to rank them in any particular order, let alone suggest appropriate penances for them. That changed however in the later Middle Ages, when each of the sins was examined in great detail, and pride, which Gregory had mentioned last, was declared to be the most serious of them because it was regarded as the root cause of all the others.
The seven deadly sins are not particular acts but sinful attitudes of the heart and behavioral habits, all of which are condemned in one form or another in the Bible. No one is likely to dispute that greed (avaritia), for example, or envy (invidia) is sinful, almost by definition, because they break the tenth commandment, which forbids coveting what belongs to others. Wrath (ira) is somewhat more complicated, partly because the Bible speaks of the wrath of God (who cannot sin) and partly because there is such a thing as righteous anger. The apostle Paul assumed that it was possible to be angry without sinning (Eph. 4:26), and although there has been a great deal of debate about what the nature of that anger might be, it does not detract from the fact that wrath is not always or necessarily sinful in itself. Gluttony (gula) is another one of the deadly sins that most people would surely disapprove of, though not everyone would treat it with the same degree of seriousness as the others. After all, gluttony is a sin against the self more than against anyone else, and this tends to lessen its significance in the eyes of most people.
The remaining deadly sins are sloth (acedia), lust (luxuria), and pride (superbia), all of which call for some comment since the modern meaning of these words is not always the same as what was meant by them in the Middle Ages. Sloth, as the Latin word for it indicates, is a spiritual sin that is not to be equated with mere laziness. It is rather an unwillingness to be diligent in pursuing the things of God, a fatigue in prayer and contemplation that becomes a tool the Devil uses to deflect us from those things. Anyone who has found it hard to concentrate in prayer, or to keep it up for any length of time, will know exactly what acedia is and will understand why it is such a deadly sin—it cuts us off from our communion with God by distracting us when we are engaged in it and trying to persuade us that it is not worth the effort. Lust (luxuria) is nowadays restricted to sexual sins in most people’s minds, but as the Latin word for it shows, it really means a desire for anything beyond what we need for living our daily lives. There can be no doubt that the Bible teaches that this is wrong; we are told to be content with what we have and not to crave things that are unnecessary and potentially harmful to our spiritual well-being (Matt. 6:25–34).
The remaining sin is that of pride (superbia), listed last by Gregory but put first by his medieval interpreters, who believed that it was because Adam and Eve wanted a higher status than the one to which they were naturally entitled that they sinned and lost their original blessedness. Whether that was true or not, there is ample indication elsewhere in Scripture that pride is one of the most serious of sins and at least a hint that it was the cause of Satan’s fall as well as Adam’s (Ezek. 28:2–10). All the other sins are in some measure a reflection of pride and stem from it one way or another. As the Latin superbia indicates, pride is the attitude of a person who thinks more highly of himself than he ought to think (Rom. 12:3); it is not meant to refer to legitimate loyalty to and satisfaction with institutions and causes to which we are personally committed and of which we are rightly “proud.” We are not talking here about taking pride in one’s work, for example, but about an attitude that distorts our perception of ourselves and therefore harms our relationship to God and to other people.
The main thing to stress about the seven deadly sins is that they are attitudes, not actions, though of course what we think will influence what we do. In medieval theology, this distinction is especially important because the seven deadly sins serve as a reminder that human sinfulness is more than a series of acts, something that the medieval system of penance was in danger of forgetting. Particular sins might be traced back to one or more of these attitudes, but they could not be equated with any one of them, and in the end the deadly sins could not be compensated for or eradicated merely by doing penance.
It is important to remember this because, although in theory it might have been possible to confess every sin, perform adequate penance, and be restored to the communion of the church as a sin-free person, in practice that was very rare. Many sins went undetected, even by the sinner himself, and so were unconfessed and never entered the penitential system at all. Others might be too serious or too embarrassing for people to be willing to admit, and so they too escaped immediate detection. Then again, it might turn out that the penance imposed was inadequate or not performed to the right degree. But above all, the lingering sinfulness of heart and mind, as represented by the seven deadly sins, could not be dealt with in this way and so remained as a barrier to entry into the presence of God. Whatever the cause, most people died with an outstanding debt of sin that made it impossible for them to go straight to heaven.13 However, the thought that most people would end up in hell, regardless of their good intentions, was too awful to contemplate, so the church came up with the notion of purgatory as a way of dealing with this problem.14 Unlike hell, purgatory is a place of cleansing after death, where the souls of those who are still imperfect could work off their outstanding debt of sin by a life of constant penance. How long this might take is unknown, of course, but there is at least the assurance that eventually those souls would end up in heaven with God. As time went on and this conception became more prevalent, the church accepted that it was possible to do extra penances on earth in the hope of reducing the time one would spend in purgatory after death. This extra penance was certified by the church as an “indulgence,” which could be obtained for relatives and others who had gone before, as well as for oneself. Eventually the embarrassment and pointlessness of doing particular acts of penance was such that it became common to commute such penance for the payment of a sum of money, which the church determined in relation to the gravity of the offence—a system analogous to the modern practice of being fined, rather than being imprisoned, for what are only minor infractions of the law. Once the commutation of penance by financial payment became an established practice, it was only logical that this facility should be extended to indulgences as well. Indulgences could therefore also be sold and sometimes were, largely in order to raise extra funds for the church. It was the sale of such indulgences that provoked Martin Luther to revolt against the system, a rebellion that ushered in the Protestant Reformation and a complete rethinking of the whole idea of sin and sinfulness.
Sin and Justification by Faith Alone
Martin Luther’s great breakthrough came when he realized that it was possible to be a sinner and yet justified in the sight of God at the same time. In the medieval system, that had been a logical impossibility because a person could only stand in the presence of God as an innocent man if he had already been cleansed from his sin. In other words, the more sanctified he was (by penance and other infusions of the divine medicine of grace), the more justified he would be considered to be. By reading the New Testament, and in particular the writings of the apostle Paul, Luther came to see that this was not the right way to understand the gospel. Like the Pharisees of old, the church of his day had lost any deep understanding of the innate sinfulness of mankind, which no amount of effort on our part can do anything about, even though that idea remained embedded in its official theology. As a young man, Luther had a brush with death that made him genuinely contrite and determined to put things right with God, and to do that he embarked upon the penitential discipline of the church with an unusual degree of enthusiasm. Yet however hard he tried to improve himself, Luther discovered that, despite everything, he was just as much a sinner as he had been before. That realization drove him to the brink of despair until God opened his eyes, and he realized for the first time what the Bible was actually saying. The righteous live by faith, not by works—by trusting in the forgiveness and infinite mercy of God and not in their own efforts.
As he worked this out, Luther came to understand that Jesus had not died for sins (as things) but for sinners (as persons). Sanctification was not a progressive cleansing of the stains left by sinful actions but union with Christ, who took our place on the cross and paid the price for our reconciliation with God. The believer is justified by being united with his Savior and covered with the divine righteousness that he brought to earth and lived out in his humanity. Union with Christ is not earned by any human activity but is a gift of God. It is bestowed by his grace and made effective in us by faith, which is the gift of God to believe in Christ. Once that union was effected, sins committed by the believer were and would continue to be covered by Christ’s forgiving righteousness. Critics of Luther were quick to seize on this assertion and accuse him of maintaining that a sinner could get to heaven merely by believing that Jesus had saved him; no change of life was necessary or even desirable. It is true that Luther’s confidence in the saving power of Christ’s righteousness was such that he could even tell his associate Melanchthon to “sin boldly.”15 What Luther meant by that was that Melanchthon did not have to fear that his ongoing sins would cut him off from the grace of God, but of course it was easy for others to misinterpret such statements and misrepresent Luther’s true doctrine, which they happily did.
Luther did not think that a believer could go on living a sinful life without doing anything about it. The reason for this was that, for him, to be united with Christ is to be filled with Christ’s Spirit and thus to have his mind, which guides believers in ways that help them to avoid sin and overcome the sinfulness inherited by virtue of their descent from Adam. In this life it will never be possible to attain sinless perfection, but believers should not worry unduly about this. Faith in Christ leads to a spirit of repentance and forgiveness and deepens the believer’s sense of union with Christ by making him ever more aware of his total dependence on Christ for his justification. A believer who sins (or who commits a crime) may still have to make amends for it in this life, but those amends will not be the basis of his claim to go to heaven when he dies. Entrance into heaven is by the grace of God, freely given in Christ without regard to any human effort.
Once Luther understood that, he quickly dropped the concept of purgatory, and before long he abandoned the entire medieval penitential system. The good works demanded of Christians were not proof of their worthiness to enter the presence of God but evidence that God was present and active in their lives.
This shift of emphasis from actual sins to the innate sinfulness of each human being brought about a new and deeper reflection on the work of Christ as mediator of the covenant between God and man. It had always been clearly understood that Christ was sinless and that it was his sinlessness that made it possible for him to become our Savior. It was precisely because he was not guilty of the sins he bore on our behalf that he could take our place before the judgment seat of God. Far from being the cause of his condemnation, his willingness to bear sins for which he was not personally responsible was a meritorious act that God the Father recognized as the basis for absolving us of our guilt and admitting us into his presence as his adopted children. In principle, all that had been long understood, but by shifting the focus of attention from the sins we commit to the broken relationship that makes us sinners in the sight of God, Luther and those who followed him transformed our understanding of the mediatorial work of the risen, ascended, and glorified Christ.
Before the Reformation, it was thought that when he ascended into heaven, the Son of God had taken the price paid for our sins and deposited it in a kind of heavenly bank, where his sacrifice constituted a kind of lump sum of grace that believers could draw on by using the so-called means of grace that were administered by the church and its priests. Christ had satisfied the demands of the Father’s justice, so there was enough grace to go around to wipe away every sin, but this store of merit kept in heaven had to be drawn on in order to be effective in wiping away the misdeeds of everyday sinners.16 By shifting their attention from those sins to their underlying cause, the broken relationship that cuts us off from God, the Protestant Reformers put a new emphasis on Christ’s present (and eternal) mediatorial work at the right hand of the Father, where he continues to plead for mercy and forgiveness to be shown to us. To put it another way, when the Father looks at us directly, he sees only sinfulness and rebellion against him, but when he looks at us through the prism of Christ, he sees that we are covered and protected by his righteousness and forgives us for that reason. Our actual sins no longer count (and are no longer counted) because they stem from our inherent sinfulness, which has been redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, who has restored us to the right relationship with God the Father.
One consequence of this new understanding is that good works performed by unbelievers must be regarded as sinful. This naturally scandalized those who believed in the meritorious value of good works and who saw the performance of them by unbelievers as signs of God’s grace at work in them, but to the Protestant mind, this makes no difference as far as their salvation is concerned. A person is not saved by his works, so the good works of an unbeliever do not count toward that. On the other hand, there was a considerable danger that unbelievers would rely on their works for their justification in the presence of God and that if they did so, they would find themselves cruelly disappointed on the day of judgment. Furthermore, as sinners cut off from the grace and mercy of God, whatever they did was the product of that condition. John Calvin made a great point in his Institutes of showing that sinful human beings have not lost the image and likeness of God and that they are still capable of exercising the dominion over the creatures that was given to Adam. He cheerfully admitted that many great and wonderful things have been done by human beings who are in rebellion against God, and Christians have benefited from them as much as anyone else. The goodness of their works could be (and in Calvin’s case was) freely acknowledged, but this does not have the slightest effect on their innate sinfulness. For all the good that they are capable of doing, they continue to be cut off from the grace of God and eternal life.17 The reason for this is that human beings are totally depraved, a concept to which Calvin gives considerable prominence in his exposition of the nature of sin.18
Total depravity does not mean that every aspect of human life is completely sinful but rather that there is nothing in us that can struggle against the power of sin in our lives, because every part of our being has been affected by it. Human beings have a constant desire to believe that we are all a mixture of good and bad elements (which is true) and that with the right training and dedication the good elements can be marshaled and directed toward controlling and overcoming the bad ones (which is false). As the canons of the Synod of Dort, called in 1618 to settle differences of opinion over this and other matters, put it:
All men are conceived in sin and are by nature children of wrath, incapable of any saving good, prone to evil, dead in sin and in bondage thereto; and without the regenerating grace of the Holy Spirit, they are neither able nor willing to turn to God, to reform the depravity of their nature, nor to dispose themselves for reformation.19
The shift from sins as acts to sinfulness as a broken relationship between the sinner and God was and still is the biggest hurdle preventing people from understanding the true nature of the gospel of Christ and accepting it. The Roman Catholic Church has never been prepared to affirm this teaching even though it recognizes that we are justified only by the grace of God moving us to put our faith in Christ. Many people who would call themselves Protestant do not accept it either, preferring to believe that there is some correlation between our actions and the reward that God the righteous judge will give us in return for them. This contradicts official Protestant doctrine, but anyone who doubts this need only consider an extreme example to see how true it is. Would Adolf Hitler have been saved if he had repented and put his faith in Christ at the very end of his life? The answer to this must be yes, but few people, including those Protestants who claim most ardently to believe in justification by faith and not by works, are prepared to accept what to them seems like an outrageous injustice. But however scandalous it may appear to some, the truth is that all of us are sinners cut off from the righteousness of God. It is not the gravity of our sinful works but the hopelessness of our fallen state that is at issue in deciding the great questions of sin and redemption, but as the extreme example mentioned above reminds us, remarkably few people are able to grasp (or accept) what this really means.
Sin and Holiness
The consequences of this unwillingness to accept the total depravity of the human race and our utter dependence on Christ for salvation from sin became apparent in the centuries following the Reformation. One of the factors that contributed to this was the fact that the proclamation of justification by faith alone did not lead to moral regeneration to the extent that might originally have been hoped for. It is hard to see into the lives of particular individuals, many of whom undoubtedly were transformed by the preaching of the gospel, but its impact was limited. Protestant churches and societies continued to harbor corruption and sinfulness that stubbornly refused to go away, and those who were truly regenerate became increasingly dissatisfied with this situation. Reliance on the grace of God alone might be official Protestant teaching, but many people came to think that a proactive approach to this was needed if the effects expected from a work of grace were ever to materialize. The English Puritans, for example, were convinced that a stricter church discipline ought to be applied in order to discourage sinful behavior even among those who had not made a personal profession of faith, and they felt increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness of either the official church or the state to accede to their requests. For example, by the end of the sixteenth century they had mostly become strict Sabbatarians and were incensed at what they saw as the profanation of the Lord’s Day by people playing sports after church. Yet when they launched a campaign against this, the king issued The Declaration of Sports, forbidding them to prevent lawful recreation on Sundays. This proved to be the last straw for some of them, and they left for America, where they tried to establish societies that would repress what they thought of as sin to a degree that they deemed adequate.
Puritan New England boasted of its religious freedom, but in reality it was a repressive society that detected “sin” at every turn. Most of the Puritans stayed at home and led a rebellion that temporarily succeeded in overthrowing the old order. In 1649 they too established what they thought was a “godly commonwealth” and promptly abolished almost every kind of popular amusement. It was even possible for a minister to lose his post if it could be proved that he had read The Declaration of Sports more than thirty years earlier, because that was supposed to indicate that he had a frivolous attitude toward sin! But whether we think of Puritan New England or of the English Commonwealth, we find that the end result was the same. Sin could not be eradicated from society, and attempts to do so by imposing the “reign of the saints” led only to hypocrisy and created an atmosphere of repression that was the very opposite of what was intended. That the Puritan experiment should end in a series of witch hunts is tragic but scarcely surprising. To achieve their aims, the Puritans had been forced to follow the path already traveled by the Pharisees and the medieval church. Once again, sin was defined by a series of socially unacceptable actions (like playing games on the Sabbath) but with the difference that they could no longer be paid for by a system of penance. Instead, sin had to be beaten out of the sinner, which led to various forms of ostracism that sometimes culminated in death, imposed by the authorities as the only way of cleansing society of its corruption.
Puritanism failed, but the desire for a purer form of life here on earth was not so easily quashed. The latter years of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth have come to be seen as an age of license and of libertinism, in which every vice condemned by the Puritans was openly practiced. This however was the behavior of the elite, and it went against the grain of much popular sentiment that continued to desire moral and spiritual purity even if it could not attain it. The outbreak of the evangelical revival, also known as the Great Awakening, in the years after John Wesley’s famous conversion in 1738 provided the occasion for this underground feeling to resurface and eventually become the dominant influence in society. The revival contributed to this, perhaps unwittingly, by its strong emphasis on the need for sinners to be born again in Christ. For some people this was a spiritual experience that did little to change their outward lives, but for others it brought about a significant transformation of their behavior. People stopped drinking, gambling, cheating, swearing, and lying. They began to apply themselves not only to Bible study but also to other useful occupations, often prospering in business and the professions because of their newfound sense of purpose and responsibility.
All that was good in itself, of course, but it was not long before people started to think that such behavior was the necessary consequence of spiritual renewal. From there it was a short step to thinking that encouraging social transformation would be a means of defeating sin. Societies for the “reformation of manners” became increasingly common and were closely associated with revivalist tendencies. In many cases these societies concentrated on genuine social evils and did tremendous work in limiting, and even eradicating, them. Swearing, drunkenness, and sexual misconduct were not only censured but also reduced, partly by the effects of genuine conversion to Christ and partly by efforts to check them by legal means. Evangelicals continued to insist on the absolute necessity of personal conversion and refused to believe that social change could come about in any other way, but the expectations placed on converts were so obviously linked to more general social reform that a certain merging of the two was understandable and probably inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was by no means unusual to find people who did not believe the doctrine of the Christian faith but who nevertheless thought that Christianity provided an indispensable moral foundation for society and supported the churches for that reason. The energetic efforts of evangelicals to abolish slavery, reduce criminal behavior by prison reform, improve medical services and treatment, eliminate child drunkenness and prostitution—all these and more were applauded far beyond the boundaries of the evangelical church and came to be accepted as normal behavior for anyone professing to be a Christian.
As a result, it was not long before evangelistic campaigns developed into social reform movements, of which the most notorious (and ultimately the most spectacularly unsuccessful) was the campaign for the prohibition of alcohol, known colloquially as teetotalism. Total abstinence from alcohol, as opposed to the condemnation of drunkenness, had never been part of Christian teaching before, and in many ways it went against biblical practice. To justify it, its supporters had to redefine temperance, a biblical virtue which at that time became synonymous with “abstinence from alcohol” even though that is not what the word means in the New Testament. By the standards of the so-called temperance movement, Jesus himself would have been thrown out of the church, an irony that was unfortunately lost on those who thought it was an integral part of the gospel.
Once again, as so often before, sin was redefined as a series of actions that a true Christian ought to avoid. The precise definition of what these actions were varied from time to time but usually included such things as working or playing games on Sunday, dancing, card playing, smoking, and theatergoing, in addition to drinking alcohol. Sexual misconduct of any kind was also forbidden, and cohabitation outside matrimony was popularly known as “living in sin.” The reduction of sin to the level of a moral code drawn up by well-meaning social reformers proved to be extremely popular, and in places where evangelical Christians were numerous, that code was often translated into legislation. Hard as it is to believe now, the United States even wrote the abolition of alcohol into its constitution, an amendment that only had to be repealed (by another amendment) when its disastrous effects became apparent.20
The chief effect of this era on the Christian church has been to trivialize sin and make holiness virtually incomprehensible to the younger generation, which can see the weaknesses of moralism but does not know what to put in its place. For many people today, sin is an old-fashioned concept that may still carry sexual connotations, although the exact status of such things as divorce, which would have been a major sin before 1950, is hard to determine now. The word sin is also used nowadays in relation to rich foods and dieting (e.g., “this chocolate cake contains a sinful number of calories”), although the only connection to the Christian idea of sin is that both threaten undesirable consequences. That we have descended to this level in popular culture is a warning to the church that the modern world no longer understands the concept of sin or sinfulness, and that in turn means that it no longer understands the true meaning of the gospel.
Toward the end of his life, John Wesley came to believe that it was possible to have a second blessing after conversion that would produce a sealing of the Holy Spirit and lead to practical sinlessness. Strictly speaking, this was not a doctrine of sinless perfection, because Wesley continued to believe that the underlying sinfulness of man remained present in every human being, but it did lead to the possibility, even to the assurance, that a believer could avoid committing actual sins. Of course, on the surface this belief appeared to magnify the grace of God even more than had been the case in earlier times because the achievement of practical holiness was entirely the work of his Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds of believers, but it was offering more than anything the gospel actually promised them. The Reformers had envisioned the Christian life as one of ongoing repentance based on a deepening sense of personal sinfulness in the presence of God and had never thought in terms of a second blessing that would raise believers to a higher plane of existence, but Wesley’s views added an extra dimension to this that was to have a considerable impact on the Protestant world long after his death.
Holiness movements were on the fringe of the mainline churches during the nineteenth century, although they created a subculture in the evangelical world, characterized by Pentecostalism in the early 1900s and since. This emphasis broke out of its ghetto in the 1960s, and today the idea of a second blessing has transmuted into different types of “charismatic” experience that have gained a foothold in all the major denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, and are often promoted as solutions to problems people have in their lives. There may be a certain reluctance to brand these problems as “sins,” perhaps because some of them, such as bankruptcy or depression, cannot really be classified in that way, but anyone who reads the literature distributed by organizations like the Alpha Course will be struck by the similarities between it and the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Now, as then, there is a steady flow of reports about how lives are being transformed as sins of various kinds are exposed, confessed, and dealt with. The benefit for the individuals concerned is doubtless considerable, but once again it must be asked whether a focus on particular sins has replaced the more fundamental problem of the underlying sinfulness that causes them. Little is said about that in charismatic circles, where the meaning of the cross and the atoning work of Christ is sometimes underemphasized. It is hard not to think that, for all the talk about new life in Christ that is heard in the churches today, there is little real grappling with the deeper issues of sin and little awareness of what that really is. In the Roman Catholic Church also, the steep decline in confession and in penitential practices shows that there is a similar underemphasis on sin, which would have surprised an earlier generation but which seems to be increasingly characteristic of our times.
Sin and Society
Not everyone who claims descent from the evangelical revival movement of the eighteenth century would subscribe to the pietistic concept of holiness, and there is a small but vocal current of thought that openly rejects it as too narrow and wrongly focused. What distinguishes them from the holiness tradition is that they do not concentrate on the bad habits of individuals but on systemic failures in the structures of modern society. In their view, dealing with sin requires extensive social reform along the lines practiced by the leading nineteenth-century evangelicals but one which does more than simply right wrongs or redistribute resources more equitably. In their view, sin is something more than the perverse desires of individual people or the abuse of laws and institutions that would be fine if they operated properly. To their way of thinking, sin has entered the very fabric of the created order and disturbed it in fundamental ways. Whether this is true or not, the main difficulty with this theory is that it is extremely difficult to see what can be done about what they call “structural sin.” Destroying existing structures is possible, but it is neither easy nor very likely to produce anything better, as twentieth-century revolutionary movements have amply demonstrated. Even if a perfect system could be discovered, it would still be administered by imperfect people, something that would be bound to compromise its effectiveness. If observation is any guide, it seems that most people who adopt this approach end up supporting particular causes such as saving the rainforests or combating discrimination against a particular social group. Worthy as these things may be in themselves, from the point of view of Christian theology they do exactly the same thing as the classical holiness movements have done: they reduce sin to a series of actions that can be avoided or reversed, but they do not get to the root of the problem. Very often people engaged in such struggles blur or do not recognize any distinction between the sacred and the secular, with the result that while they claim to be more spiritual than those who distinguish clearly between these two, they end up avoiding any mention of God or his standards of righteousness in the message they proclaim. Instead they speak the language of secular politics, and those among them who are ministers of the church frequently use their positions and prestige to make pronouncements on matters of which they have little knowledge, giving the impression that this is the only way to preach the gospel in the modern world. In the end, sin becomes anything they disagree with, and to eradicate it their opponents have to be crushed if not eliminated altogether. The struggle for justice ends up as a new kind of tyranny, and as has so often happened in the past, one form of sin is replaced by another, with the underlying sinfulness of mankind remaining as present and as powerful as it has ever been. How all this will play out in the end, only time will tell, but honesty compels us to admit that just as the root problem of human sinfulness has not changed since the fall of Adam, so the attempts to deny or control it, so that it can be defeated by human means instead of divine ones, are still the greatest obstacles to the preaching of the gospel of Christ today and seem likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
1 This includes the two books he wrote against the Manichees (written in 389), an unfinished commentary on the literal sense of Genesis (written in 393), the final books of his Confessions (written about 400), and the twelve books of a literal commentary on Genesis (written between 401 and 415).
2 1 Cor. 2:14. This verse has often been mistranslated and therefore misunderstood. We do not have a word precisely equivalent to the Greek psychikos, so it is frequently rendered as “natural,” rather than as “unspiritual” or “unregenerate,” which is what it really means. The result of this can lead to absurd translations, as when the English Standard Version describes the one who does not know God as a “natural person.” It does not seem to have occurred to the translators that Jesus the Son of God is also a “natural person,” as indeed are God the Father and the Holy Spirit!
3 See John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 143–46, for a discussion of this and a comparison with the position of the Western church.
4 The belief that mortality is the cause of sin is strangely similar to the pagan Greek idea that sin was the result of finitude. Christians could not say that because of their doctrine of creation, but the appearance of mortality within creation is a clever way of reintroducing the limitations imposed by finitude without actually saying so.
5 Augsburg Confession, 2.2. See Gerald L. Bray, Documents of the English Reformation, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2004), 606.
6 Ep. 101.
7 It is not the theology of any Protestant church either, though for other reasons (see below).
8 Augustine uses the phrase in Sermon 293.8.
9 The other reason was the extremely high infant mortality rate. Given the church’s teaching that an unbaptized baby would go to hell because of its inheritance of original sin, this concern is understandable.
10 A view based on Heb. 6:4–6. The Donatists were named after Donatus, one of the early leaders of the sect.
11 The Latin word venia means “forgiveness.”
12 Moralia 7, 28.34.
13 The tiny minority who did were the “saints,” who were then expected to intercede for those less fortunate than they.
14 For the origins of this, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
15 Martin Luther, “Letter 91,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 48, ed. J. Pelikan et al. (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955), 276–77.
16 Medieval theologians were not universalists, in the sense that they did not believe that everyone would eventually be saved, but the logic of their atonement theory would seem to point in that direction. If Christ’s blood was sufficient to atone for every sin ever committed, how could it not do so? It is hard to believe that it would have failed in its purpose or that there was some blood left over after the last judgment.
17 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics, 20–21 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2.2.12–19.
18 Ibid., 2.1.9.
19 Canon 3/4.3. See Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994), 466.
20 It is widely recognized today that the chief effect of prohibition, as this was called, was to give criminal gangs such as the Sicilian Mafia a golden opportunity to break the law with the connivance of a broad segment of society and give gangsters an aura of glamor, which remains, long after the repeal of the law they flouted.