The Christian View Of Sin
THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
THE earliest exponent of the ethical nature of sin was the Apostle Paul.
The exposition of its theological nature belongs to the Old Testament.
It was the mission of the Jewish literature to exhibit it as a violation of the law of God, and this was doubtless a great work to do.
But it was after all only one half of the problem; it was reserved for another dispensation to unfold the other half.
Judaism said, Sin is a violation of the law of God; it was left for Christianity to say, It is a violation of the law of man.
As we have said, the man who first made this declaration was St. Paul.
To him in a special sense the problem of sin presented itself as a problem of ethics.
It was not so much a mystery of the universe as a mystery of his own soul.
That it had raised a middle wall of partition between himself and God was a fact ever patent to his mind, but there was another fact, if possible, more patent still—that it had raised a middle wall of partition between himself and a part of his own mind.
"Q wretched man that I am, who shall deliver
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me from this body of death!" 'The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these two are contrary;" 'The evil that I would not, that I do, and the good that I would, that I do not; there is a law in my members warring against the law of my mind;" through all these there breathes one thought—the idea of inward conflict.
What are the elements of this conflict as they appear to the Gentile Apostle?
The notion of war implies at least two combatants.
What are they?
That is the first and fundamental question.
A subsequent question will be, Which of them is evil? or, Wherein consists the evil of either?
But before any decision can be arrived at as to the cause of moral obliquity, it will be necessary to put our hand on those elements of human nature which in the view of Paul are in a state of disunion.
The Apostle describes these under the names of the flesh and the spirit.
What does he mean by that ?
Does he mean the body and the soul?
Assuredly not.
Paul would never have said that matter lusted against mind.
None knew better than he that the principle of lust or desire is essentially a mental principle.
When he said that by the cross of Christ the world had been crucified to him, he certainly was not thinking of the demolition of streets and buildings.
He knew well that the world is not without but within a man, and that no abstinence from outward meats or from outward pleasures could make a man unworldly.
The
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OF SIN.
very centre of his gospel lies in the assertion that the circumcision of the flesh availeth nothing,
If matter had been, in his view, the antagonist of what he calls the spirit, it is hard to see why he should not have hailed circumcision as the saviour of mankind; it is hard to see why he should not have welcomed an agency which seemed evidently to symbolise the crucifixion of the material nature of man.
But Paul felt that no material crucifixion was of the slightest value.
He felt that if he could give all his goods to feed the poor, nay, that if he could give his very body to be burned, it would profit him nothing, if the act were not prompted by charity.
Here is a conclusive statement, a statement which at once and for ever negatives the attribution of asceticism to the Christian system.
It is declared in the plainest terms that no outward impoverishment however complete, no outward torture however severe, no outward mutilation however humiliating, would bring a human being one step nearer to the great goal of final perfection, that the sacrifice of the physical man is neither acceptable to the worshipper nor the Worshipped until behind the sacrifice is heard the living voice :
"To, I come, I delight to do Thy will."
When Paul speaks then of the flesh and the spirit, he is not alluding to two kinds of existence, but to two kinds of thought, more correctly, two kinds of love—self-love and universal love.
In the view of Paul things were classified as belonging to the 10}
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flesh or to the spirit quite irrespective of their material or mental character.
The pursuit of a material object might be an act of the spirit; the pursuit of a mental object might be an act of the flesh.
To seek wealth as a means of charity would to him have been in the highest sense spiritual ; to seek knowledge as a source of fame would have been viewed by him as essentially carnal.
Two men might gaze on the same physical scene, and, to the one it might be a scene of the flesh, to the other an experience of the spirit.
To the one it might be fraught with impressions of lewdness and impregnated with suggestions of impurity; to the other it might be laden with a burden of grief for the sins and sorrows of humanity.
It was thought, and thought alone, that gave a character to things.
The flesh and the spirit then in the system of.
'St. Paul refer not to the scene through which a man travels, but to the vehicle in which he travels.
They describe not his surroundings but his state, not his acts but his motives.
'The flesh represents the love which he has for himself; the spirit stands for the love he bears to others.
The flesh is the self-centring principle by which a man is impelled to seek his own good; the spirit is that power of self-forgetfulness by which he is enabled to seek a good not his own.
'The flesh is the individual unit; the spirit is the universal man.
The question now arises, Which of these is to be sought and which shunned?
The answer which naturally and
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spontaneously suggests itself is that in the view of St. Paul the flesh is the evil part of our nature, and the part which needs to be repressed.
If this be Paul's meaning, if in the Christian system the desire of individual good counts in itself for sin, then we have no hesitation in saying that the Christian morality is a mutilated morality.
For it is quite true what Auguste Comte says—that to repress the personal instincts is not to improve but to destroy the morality of man.* We have already pointed out that no man can do good to another without first saying to himself,
This is what in his place I should like done to me.
The imagination of personal pleasure is the very condition of benevolence.
If the sense of selfinterest, that which St. Paul calls the flesh, be a sin, then the whole moral life of man is made an impossibility.
But does St. Paul say so?
Does he mean for a moment to suggest that the flesh or the individual part of a man's nature is sinful; that to seek the things of the flesh is to love sin?
So far is he from saying so, that the very passage which seems at first sight to favour such a view is found on closer inspection to be the strongest and the most conclusive evidence against it.
If Paul had merely said, The flesh lusteth against the spirit, we might have thought that in his view the flesh was the sole aggressor and the spirit the only martyr.
But Paul does not stop here.
He * Positive Philosophy, ii. 131.
Miss Martineau's translation.
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goes on to say that in the manifestation of moral evil not only does the flesh lust against the spirit, but the spirit lusts against the flesh.
Here is a new light upon the whole subject.
The spirit is no longer the sole martyr in the struggle, nor is it on account of the spirit alone that Paul deprecates the life of sin; he deprecates it quite as much in the interest of the flesh.
He is not a whit more anxious for the spiritual than he is for the carnal nature of man, because he knows well that the soul without the body would be as dead as the body without the soul.
Therefore he is eager that the flesh should not any more than the spirit have an antagonist, a foe to its development.
He is eager that the individual man, like the universal man, should be protected from all enmities, should be shielded from all influences which would hinder his orowth and nourishment.
The Apostle of Gentile liberty demands a free soil for the tree of natural life; he would have nothing to war against the flesh.
The truth is, St. Paul has no idea of blaming either the flesh or the spirit.
He sincerely commiserates both.
He regards both as the victims of a third power which has produced disorganisation in their joint action, and prevented either from achieving its destiny.
Sin is to him that which has set the flesh and the spirit at variance.
Its evil lies in this, that it has impaired the united strength of two great and glorious powers which
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were made to work in unison.
What it is in itself he does not pretend to know, does not seek to inquire: for him as for us it means the mystery of iniquity.
What Paul does seek to fathom is the manifestation of the mystery.
He asks, What is sin in the world? what is it as an actual fact? how does it show itself? in what way would its absence be shown?
'These were Paul's questions, and they were practical questions, to be answered not by speculation, but by observation.
'To answer these questions he did the only thing that a man could do—he looked around him.
He cast his eye upon the world as it actually was, upon the men and women who composed the society in which he lived and moved.
And what did he see in this society ?
He saw an anomaly in the world of nature.
He beheld two laws of the universe, evidently meant for good and certainly designed to co-operate with one another, breaking up into mutual antagonism, and becoming a source of the wildest anarchy.
He beheld the flesh and the spirit, which the hand of God had joined together, put asunder by another hand, and that which originally was constructed to be a bond of union becoming mysteriously and unnaturally an element of discord.
It was the supernatural in nature that troubled the heart of the Apostle—the presence of a false note in the rhythm of the universal music.
It mattered not to which side he turned, whether to the flesh or the spirit, the same jar met his spiritual ear, the same
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irresistible evidence that there was a broken cord in the organ of human life.
Let us look for a moment at the matter in detail.
The flesh lusteth against the spirit.
Here is the first side of Paul's problem, the first manifestation of the great mystery.
He saw in the world around him, nay, he felt within his own breast the operation of that power which we call self-love.
He perceived it to be in itself a good power—a power which made for righteousness.
He felt that if a man was to love his brother as himself, it was well that he should have some amount of self-love ; otherwise he could have no standard by which to judge of his brother's grief or joy.
But Paul saw that if this power made for righteousness in idea, it made for unrighteousness in fact.
It ought to have been a source ofsympathy ; it actually was a source of selfishness.
Instead of making his own wants a standard by which to measure the wants of humanity, each man took them as an incentive to live to himself alone.
Nay, this was not all, nor even the worst.
The very power to conjure up what another would feel had been degraded into an instrument of human torture.
Conscious of what pain was in himself, he imagined how it would be felt by another.
That power of imagination was meant to make him merciful, but it had made him cruel.
It had incited him to wars, to murders, to revenges.
It had goaded him on to the gratification of spite and spleen.
It had inspired him to the
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7a commission of deeds unworthy of the lower creation.
Tt had led to the satisfaction of malice and hatred and envy and all uncharitableness.
The light had led astray which yet was light from heaven.
Paul saw this, and he said there was something wrong :
"Men and brethren, these things ought not so to be."
He felt that here if anywhere there was a miracle of miracles, the violation not of one law but of universal law—the law of creation's harmony, the law of God.
He felt that he had outraged a principle of the universe, and therefore had become an alien in the universe.
By no theological dogma, by no national training, by no metaphysical subtlety, but simply by the logic of stern facts, his mind was forced to the conviction that something had separated between him and his God.
Look now at the other side of the Apostle's problem:
The spirit lusteth agamst the flesh.
He saw in the world another tendency the opposite of self-love, by which men were impelled to sacrifice, rather than to seek their own; they called it the sense of duty.
It prompted them often to great deeds of self-denial.
It led them at times to forego the natural pleasures of life.
It sent some into the desert, into the hermitage, into the ascetic's cell.
It drove others to seek untimely martyrdom.
It caused all to believe that the essence of virtue lay in its being the absence of individual joy—the crucifixion of the flesh, Now what Paul asked was this: Why should virtue have any such tendency ?
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Why should the Divine life in the soul be the only life without pleasure, without individual pleasure ?
Was there piety in the fact of pain?
Why should individual joy be the antithesis of life for the universe?
Was not the very existence of such an antithesis a proof that there was something wrong ?
Why should not a man's life for God and for his fellow-man be prompted by a motive of Epicurean joy—by a joy of the individual heart, in which there was no sense of obligation, but the perfect calm of a satisfied desire?
The spirit ought not to crucify the flesh, ought not to feel that its own merit was greater in proportion as its task was felt to be difficult.
In the very sense that something was being sacrificed, in the very experience of a struggle in the individual life, in the very conviction of a submission to self-denial which deserved the name of merit, the spirit was already bearing testimony that it had not put all things under its feet.
It was uttering from another side of the creation the same voice which the flesh had already uttered—that man had violated the law of God.
Such is clearly the meaning of St. Paul in the second and less obvious clause of the passage now under review.
The spirit is convicted of antagonism to the flesh by its very sense of merit.
Where there is individual pleasure, in other words, where the spirit does not lust against the flesh, there is no sense of merit.
The mother does not think it ~ meritorious to love her child, and why?
Because
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spe it costs no struggle; the flesh is married to the spirit, the law of duty coincides with the path of interest.
The mother's love is to her an individual joy, and she would not dream of claiming merit for that which is a joy.
Now this is the ethical meaning of that doctrine which has always been peculiarly associated with what is called evangelical
Christianity—the doctrine that the true saint is unconscious of any-merit.
To make use of a former illustration, talent will be the same when it becomes genius.
Let poetry become the expression of a man's nature, and he will no longer be proud of his verses.
His sense of merit will decline with his literary toil.
In proportion as art becomes nature it will become unconscious, it will reach the nearest resemblance to its extreme opposite—mechanical inspiration.
The harmony of the spirit and the flesh would make virtue so much a personal joy that the spiritual man would be spoken of as the natural man, and the sense of merit in the performance of duty would be exchanged for the sense of privilege in the enjoyment of nature.
But there is a correlative side of this subject, which must not be omitted from the Christian ethics of sin.
If it be true that in the Christian system the sense of merit declines with the advance of spiritual life, it is not less true that with the same advance the sense of demerit increases.
The nearer a man comes to the realisation of a harmony of soul, the more keenly is he impressed with the
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actual discord in his own heart.
This, too, is an universal law and no paradox.
Absolute sin can have no sense of sin.
It is essential to the very existence of conscience that a man should not be all evil.
"I had not known sin but for the law," says St. Paul, 2.e. only a man's waking virtue can detect his power for vice, only by his effort to rise does he learn the depth of his fall.
Hence the immediate fruit of all virtue is pain.* Just as the first effect of a stream of light projected over a hitherto unbroken darkness would be to reveal to those who dwell therein the presence of that darkness, so the first effect of a vision of purity is to render the human spirit conscious of its own impurity.
That is the reason why in the initial stage of Christian tuition the emphasis is laid on repentance and on confession.
It is not that the confession of sin is in itself of any value, but it is an index of the spiritual life.
Its value is founded upon the fact that no man can begin with the recognition of darkness; he can only see darkness after he has known light.
If then a man confesses a vision of darkness, it can only be because the light has come, and that is the value of his confession.
He had not known sin but for the law; the fact that he knows sin is a proof that he has become the subject of law.
And the deeper he penetrates into this subjection, the more will he feel the power of darkness.
The loftier be a man's ideal, the humbler * Cf, Mill's Utilitarianism, pp. 41, 42.
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TS will be the man.
'Not as though I had already attained," "If by any means I might attain," "I count not myself to have apprehended," "I am the least of all the Apostles"—these are the words of one who was very near to the blaze of the absolute vision, who had touched the very threshold of the temple of holiness.
The light which made him feel dark was the illumination of his own heart, the vision which made him blind was the brightness of his own ideal.
The picture of a stainless moral life had been hung up in his soul, a life in which sacrifice had become an Epicurean joy; he had seen the glory of the cross.
For that very reason all other things were without glory, himself included.
He felt the despair of admiration.
He could never reach his ideal.
It was too beautiful ; it lay beyond his grasp; it seemed to fly before him as he advanced, and he could only follow afar off.
In the presence of the perfect portrait he felt himself the chief of sinners.
And yet this man Paul was not afraid at the same moment to say, Be ye followers of me.
He was not afraid in the deepest consciousness of his sin to offer his experience as a goal for human attainment.
How are we to explain this paradox ?
Why should a man assert his moral dignity in the very hour when he feels his moral depravity?
The reason lies in a fact which forms one of the most remarkable features in the portraiture of Christian ethics.
It is from the sense of sin, which tells him
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he is a slave, that man first learns his right to be free.
'There have been systems which have taught that man's will is in bondage, there have been systems which have taught that man's will is in liberty, but Christianity alone has united the contradictory conclusions, Christianity alone has seen that man's moment of conscious bondage is his moment of potential freedom.
What does Paul mean when he says, The law of the spit of life hath made me free from the law of sin and death ?
He means that the law which told him he was a sinner told him that sin was alien to his nature.
Had it not been alien to his nature it would not have come to him as a pain, nor would he have felt it to be a bondage.
He would no more have experienced it as a privation than a man born blind experiences as a privation the want of sight.
His sense of darkness proved that light was his birthright, and he felt that his birthright must be within reach of his normal powers.
His ideal of purity was itself his moral obligation to seek it, and the fact of his moral obligation was the proof of his power.
He said, like the German thinker of a later age, I ought, therefore I can; in proportion to my sense of obligation, so is my measure of power.* Between Saul of Tarsus, the Protestant of the first century, and Emmanuel Kant, the Protestant of the eighteenth, there is, indeed, on the purely historical side a very marked intellectual
* See Kant's " Categorical Imperative," Metaph. of Ethics, p. 27, 3rd ed.
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Th resemblance.
Both rose into being as the result of a reaction.
Both set themselves in antagonism to a conventional and legal theology.
Both sought to re-establish religion upon a basis of inward morality.
Both made the starting-point of that morality to consist in something which was not national but universal.
Both, above all, through the sense of actual dependence, arrived at the prophetic recognition of a possible freedom, recognised in their very power to feel their chain the evidence that the chain was not their birthright, and the power that impelled them to be free.
Ina word, to the religious reformer of the first century, and to the philosophic reformer of the eighteenth, the chain of moral corruption presented itself as a burden of responsibility, and where there is a burden of responsibility there is already a sense of independence.
The man who is weighed down with the conviction of something which he ought to do, may indeed be bowed to the earth as one who bears the yoke, but the load which makes him a servant is the weight of his own riches.
The study of the Christian doctrine of sin leads us directly to the gates of a new problem—the Christian exposition of the ground of human responsibility.
To the study of that new problem we must now direct our attention.