2 Humanity: The Climax of God’s Creation
Humanity: the climax of God’s Creation
Dorothy L. Sayers had a great gift for putting her finger on things that really matter. In a lecture of 1940, she reminded her audience that the creed ‘purports to tell us the essential facts, not only about God, but about the true nature of man’.1 So what are human beings? What makes us different from the rest of Creation, according to the Christian faith? It’s one of the most important questions we can ask. The greatest ethical, social and political debates all depend on an understanding of what it means to be human, and on how our humanity may be expressed and fulfilled.
For example, consider the question of justice – a passionate concern for many in today’s complex and broken world. Yet justice is not something that we can ‘read off ’ the world. Indeed, some attempts to ground justice in nature have ended up promoting the Darwinian idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’. But what of widows and orphans? Or the powerless and weak? In his penetrating and highly acclaimed writings on the nature of justice, Michael Sandel, who is Professor of Government at Harvard University, argues that any notion of justice depends upon beliefs about human nature, values and purpose.2 Secular liberalism represents a hollow and shallow view of the world, which ends up merely defending the right of citizens to do whatever they please, as long as they hurt no one else. But real justice is about principles and ideals – about what human nature is and ought to be.
As we are beginning to see, a central theme of the Christian faith is that the Holy Spirit is the agent by which God enables things – including human beings – to become what they are meant to be. The Holy Spirit is the bringer of life and renewal. The creeds help us to realize that, without God, we have not really begun to live.
So what do the creeds tell us about human nature? What difference do these ideas make to us, and how do they connect up with the Holy Spirit?
On being human
‘We are all nothing but atoms and molecules!’ This was the punch-line to an atheist speaker’s rather dreary lecture in London that I attended a few years ago. Human beings are insignificant, he declared. We need to get used to the idea that life is meaningless and pointless. The speaker invited his audience to abandon their delusions about themselves and make the bold and brave admission that we are the accidental product of a random process. Sure, it was hard to admit this. But that was why atheism was so cool! Better to be right than deluded.
He lost the audience’s sympathy completely. As one be-mused student remarked to me afterwards, that kind of atheism offered such a dull, bleak view of humanity that he couldn’t imagine anyone taking it seriously. Even if it was right (which he very much doubted), it was so unimaginably drab that he suspected many would end up becoming religious just to get away from the sheer tedium of the speaker’s godless world.
I agreed with him. But I also pointed out that the speaker was demonstrably wrong in his views about human nature. Why? Let me explain.
It’s true that human beings are made up of atoms and molecules, that we are a walking collection of chemicals. If my quick calculation is right, human beings could be reduced to enough water to have a shower and enough fat to make half a dozen bars of soap. Those things would not raise any significant sum, so in one way the atheist speaker was right. But only in one way – and a very misleading way at that, as we’ll discuss in a moment.
This process of reducing human beings to the function and value of commodities is called ‘dehumanization’. It’s what the Nazis did to those in the death camps, like Auschwitz. When people arrived in the camps, they were given numbers. No longer did they have names – chosen by loving and caring parents and often linking them with their family’s history – they were now to be identified merely by a collection of digits. Then they were set to work, like impersonal cogs in a vast industrial machine. Their value was determined by what they could produce. And when they were no longer productive, they were killed. Their hair was used to stuff mattresses, and their gold fillings used to make bullion bars. They had ceased to be people and had become commodities. They had been dehumanized.
This reductionist view of humanity is set out in one of the less perceptive statements of the biologist and Nobel laureate Francis Crick:
You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.3
C. S. Lewis regularly protested against reductionist accounts of reality. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the children shows off his scientific knowledge of astronomy to Ramandu, an old man who lived on a Narnian island. ‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’ The old man was not impressed. ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.’ Lewis’s point was that we too easily fall into the trap of believing that describing what something is made of tells us what it really is.
The truth is that human beings can be defined at multiple levels, and each level helps us understand the complexity of human nature. The physicist will tell us that we are made of atoms and molecules. She’s right. But she’s wrong if she adds that ridiculous word ‘just’. The chemist will tell us that life is the result of complex chemical reactions, leading to food being converted to energy. The physiologist will tell us about the various organs that make up the human body and what each of them does. But we transcend all of these levels of description! If humanity is defined by anything, it is not what we find at the bottom of the ladder, but at the top.
Richard Dawkins, the world’s most prominent atheist, is interesting on this point. Dawkins was one of the high-profile defenders of the ‘gene’s eye’ view of life, which was very popular back in the 1980s. For Dawkins, everything was determined by our DNA – the complex biological model that transmits genetic information. We are simply there to allow our genes to transfer themselves to future generations. These genes ‘are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence’. Whether we like it or not, we exist simply in order to pass on our genes.4
Does that seem inadequate? Dawkins tells us that this is the way things are and we need to get used to it. ‘DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.’ Viewed through the lens of Dawkins’ aggressive scientific reductionism, all existence is nothing more than assemblies of molecules, some of which happened to be arranged in the form of those gene-perpetuating machines that we call ‘human beings’. Yet there is a very telling passage at the end of his book The Selfish Gene, which many believe contradicts the whole analysis that precedes it. Having consistently argued that we are the prisoners of our genes, Dawkins makes the dramatic statement that there is something different about human beings! ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’ There is more to us than our biology. We are, Dawkins declares, able to transcend these limits!
Now in many ways Dawkins has simply evaded a problem of his own making. Having fallen into the trap of what many would see as a crude genetic determinism, he protests against its inadequacies. Yet his protest against the view that we are ‘just’ genes, or that our identity and character are determined by our DNA, is a recognition that there is more to human nature than a purely biological, chemical or physical account. Science helps us understand how we function; but there’s a lot more to human identity than this.
What more needs to be said? The Christian view does not deny that we are made of atoms and molecules, nor that DNA exists and plays an important role in the transmission of genetic information. It does not seek to take away, but to add. It agrees that atoms, molecules and genes are all part of who we are, while insisting that we accept that there is more to human nature than this. It argues that we transcend the building blocks from which we are made, rather like an artistic masterpiece transcends its brush strokes.
Let’s try to make this important point clearer. When I was young, my father and I visited some elderly sisters who lived close to us. My father wanted to make sure that they were coping with a viciously cold winter and see if they needed anything. While we were there, they showed us some of their prize possessions. Most of these were uninteresting to me – except for one. It was a personal handwritten letter from Winston Churchill, dating back to the 1950s, wishing them both a joyful Christmas and apologizing for not having seen them for so many years. Neither my father nor I had realized that these sisters were related to Churchill. They were clearly delighted with this letter, partly because it showed that they were connected to someone important, and partly because it was a genuinely interesting letter.
Now, in one sense, that letter was simply a piece of paper with some ink on it. To use that tired old phrase, so hopelessly over-worked by atheist dogmatists, it was ‘nothing but atoms and molecules’. But that is clearly a totally inadequate description of the letter. Yes, it was ‘atoms and molecules’. But it was so much more than that. It was proof that these sisters were related to Winston Churchill. It was a token of his affection and concern.
The Genesis creation accounts emphasize that we are more than physical structures; the Spirit of God inhabits us. ‘The LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being’ (Genesis 2.7). Yes, we do originate from the dust; yes, we are formed of the material of the world around us; but we are more than this! Let’s now begin to unpack how the Christian faith provides for an understanding of human nature.
As we saw in The Living God (72– 6), the Christian faith declares that human beings bear the ‘image of God’. This helps us appreciate our accountability towards God, and the ability of the human mind to make some sort of sense of the world around us. But perhaps most importantly, it enables us to relate to God as we relate to those closest to us, whether friends or family. Companionship with God is what we are made for – God is both the source and the goal of human existence – and without God, we will never achieve our deepest aims, find our heart’s desire or secure ultimate fulfilment.
One of the pithiest statements of this point is found in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647– 8), which sets out 107 questions about faith, followed by snappy answers.
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.
C. S. Lewis greatly admired this line of what he called the ‘Scotch Catechism’. Why? Because ‘in commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him’. This is a wonderful summary of what the Christian faith tells us lies at the heart of human existence.
As we noted earlier, everyone has their own ideas about the true nature and goals of human nature. Secular humanism, for example, holds that human beings only achieve their true identity and meaning by rejecting religion and belief in God. Christians, on the other hand, believe that we find our true significance and destiny by embracing God. That’s why so many Christians argue that Christianity is the real and best form of humanism. That may seem strange to some readers, so let me explain.
The word ‘humanism’ came into being at the time of the Renaissance and has nothing to do with secularism or atheism.5 The term was hijacked in the last century by those arguing that humanity needs to be liberated from an oppressive belief in God. Yet the great humanists of the Renaissance – such as Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 –1536) – believed that God enriched and fulfilled human life and experience. To become what we are meant to be and to have the joy and peace that we are meant to have means embracing, loving and walking with God. Erasmus would be appalled at the dogmatic atheism that is now associated with the word ‘humanism’!
Let’s think more about this core Christian idea of God as our true goal. Some friends of my parents moved house a few years ago. Their new home was only half an hour’s drive from the old one, and shortly after their arrival their cat went missing. After a while they gave up looking for him, assuming he had got lost. Some weeks later, they had a phone call from the new owners of their old house. Had they lost a cat? One had turned up at their home and was behaving as if it lived there. My parents’ friends drove over immediately and were delighted to find their cat alive and well. The cat didn’t seem so interested in them, however. It was the house he liked. And in the end, there he stayed. The new owners had by then become so fond of him that they adopted him.
The cat had a homing instinct. And so do we. We possess a built-in longing for God. And it remains a part of us, no matter how hard we try to suppress it, ignore it or explain it away as an irrational outcome of our evolutionary past. Eternity has been planted in our hearts. I’ve always liked the poems of Francis Quarles (1592–1644), especially his Emblems, in which he compares the human soul to a magnetic needle, constantly attracted to the north pole of God:
Like to the Artick needle, that does guide
the wandering shade by his Magneticke pow’r.6
It’s a nice image, which Quarles develops further by suggesting that God is like a ‘lodestone’ – a naturally magnetized piece of stone that draws metals (including compass needles) to itself. We are made in such a way that we are drawn to God, so that we can find our road home.
God established a relationship with humanity through creation, restored it through redemption and will bring it to completion in heaven. This idea is especially important as we begin to think about a theme that puzzles many – the idea of the ‘soul’.
What is the soul?
One of my problems with Christianity as a young man was the idea that human beings consist of a mortal body and an immortal soul. I imagined the body as some kind of home for the latter, and that once you died, the soul went to heaven. I’m not sure where I got these ideas from or why I thought that they were an essential part of the Christian package. After all, there’s no mention of them in the creeds.
When I became a scientist, I could see no reason whatsoever for believing in some immaterial and eternal soul, which was temporarily resident in the human body until death and then made its way somewhere else. If this was intrinsic to Christian belief, I had a bit of a problem.
Now some Christians do indeed believe in an immortal soul, like the great scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225 –74). In the Middle Ages, a distinction was made between the ‘body’ and the ‘soul’ (Latin: anima). Humans, it was argued, were distinguished from all other animals and inanimate objects by the possession of a ‘soul’. This approach was justified on biblical grounds, in that the New Testament generally speaks of ‘body and soul’, and occasionally of ‘body, soul and spirit’. References to the ‘body’ were generally understood by medieval writers like Aquinas to refer to the physical and material parts of humanity, whereas the ‘soul’ was understood as an immaterial and eternal spiritual entity that merely resided within the human body.
But is this really how we ought to interpret the biblical statements about human identity? Many scholars in the twentieth century pointed out that the notion of an immaterial soul was a secular Greek concept rather than a biblical one. The vision of humanity found in the Old Testament was that of a single entity, an inseparable ‘psychosomatic unit’, with many facets or aspects. The Old Testament conceives of humanity ‘as an animated body and not as an incarnate soul’ (H. Wheeler Robinson).7
‘Soul’ is an Anglo-Saxon word used to translate a variety of biblical terms, many of which have the general sense of ‘the basis of life’ or ‘a living being’. The Old Testament tends not to use these terms to refer to parts of the human body, but rather understands them as aspects of human existence. We see a similar trend in the New Testament. When Paul talks about not living or walking ‘according to the flesh but according to the Spirit’ (Romans 8.4), he isn’t referring to two different parts of humanity – flesh and spirit. Rather, he is talking about two quite different ways of living: existing at a purely human level, and coming to life in a way that connects up with God.
We could thus think of the ‘soul’ as that aspect of our being that relates to God, or our God-given ability to enter into a relationship with God. This is what gives us our true identity in the first place, and maintains it in the second.
Why is this so important? For two reasons: first, because of how our identity is expressed, and second, because of how it is sustained. In our increasingly bureaucratic culture, most of us are identified through nationality, passport number, fingerprints or DNA. These are often highly efficient ways of distinguishing us from other people. For example, the chance of two people, including twins, having the same fingerprint is less than one in a billion.
Both fingerprints and DNA are coded mathematically to enable easy identification, especially in forensic contexts.8 They are expressing our personal identity in a highly impersonal way. The issue here is that we would never normally define ourselves thus: we would more naturally think in terms of the things that we do and the people that matter to us.
It is a fact that our Christian identity is expressed by a name – not a number or code. ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine’ (Isaiah 43.1). Names express our uniqueness and value. To call someone by name is to demonstrate that you know her; she matters enough for you to remember what her name is.
Some of the farmers I know in the Cotswolds raise livestock for a living. Even though they often become very fond of the animals on their farms, they tell me they never give them names. Why not? Because it makes sending the animals to market very traumatic. As one farmer said to me, ‘When you give an animal a name, it becomes special to you.’
Our identity is expressed within a network of relationships in which we both belong and matter, whether as a member of a family, as a friend or as a colleague. Christianity supplements this with one additional relationship – with the living God. Paul speaks in one of his letters of believers being ‘adopted as his children’ (Ephesians 1.5). This powerful image suggests someone who does not belong anywhere, or matter to anyone, being drawn into a new family and given a new identity and a new status because he or she is wanted; because he or she matters. In the ancient world, family identity was of crucial importance to an individual’s sense of self-worth. Paul’s point is that believers are members of God’s family and as such have a new status and relationship. We shall consider this further in the next chapter.
This identity cannot be taken away from us. Someone may lose her job and with it the prestige and connections it brings. Someone may lose his memory and with it access to the past. But our relationship with God abides, and can never be erased or destroyed. It is nourished and sustained by the presence of the Spirit within us, who constantly reassures us that we are loved. ‘When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ’ (Romans 8.15 –17).
Free and finite? The human dilemma
In the previous section, we emphasized the importance of our capacity to relate to God. We need to explore this a little further and ask what it tells us about the abilities and limitations of being human. The Christian tradition uses a significant range of terms to describe the relationship between the believer and God – love, faithfulness and commitment – ideas that are reflected and embedded in the best human relationships.
Some atheist writers, of course, would suggest that we have simply invented God and imposed values we respect, or desire to have ourselves, upon this imaginary relationship. But as we have seen, the Christian doctrine of creation provides us with a framework for declaring that the best in human life echoes our origins in God. Our values, ideas and actions may be seen as the afterglow of the act of creation, clarified and infused with passion in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
One of the core themes of this understanding of creation is that a loving God creates a people capable of love – of loving one another and of loving God. This relationship exists at both the corporate level (the ‘people of God’) and the individual. God offers love to us, gives love to us and invites a response of love from us. ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us’ (Romans 5.5). A number of points emerge from this.
First, although God is indeed love, God shows that love in and through Jesus of Nazareth. Actions speak louder than words, and God’s demonstration of love confirms and extends what has been promised. Second, it takes two to be in a loving relationship. God may indeed love us, but unless we love God in return, no relationship has been established. We see here the idea of reciprocation, which is such an important aspect of the Christian understanding of a personal God.
Our interest in this section will actually focus on a third aspect of love. Love is something that must be freely accepted. An imposed love is no love at all. God has created us with the capacity to love and to respond to love. And in each case, love is an expression of freedom, in which we make ourselves vulnerable, open to rejection by the object of our love.
The theme of God’s love being rejected by Israel is common in the prophetic writings, and is found in a particularly pointed form in some texts that many Christian churches appoint to be read during Lent, especially Passiontide. Why? Because the same pattern of spurned love is found in the betrayal, trial and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
What does all this point to? Simply that God created us with the freedom to say ‘no’. The Old Testament prophets sometimes compare God to a parent who brought a child into the world. Having cared for the child, God watched with sadness as it went its own way, making mistakes and spurning its parent’s love. Yet God waited for the child to return, as patiently and lovingly as the father of the prodigal watched from the roof of his house, hoping to see the return of his wayward son from the distant land where he was exiled (Luke 15).
So what sort of freedom do we have? At first sight, this seems a very easy question to answer. Both the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount tell us to choose to do good and to cease doing evil. Surely we can manage this?
Some within the Christian tradition have argued that this is the case, maintaining that Christians have an obligation to fulfil these commandments in their totality. Many others have been less sure. What if human nature is so weak and fallible that we turn out to be incapable of doing these things? The great Roman poet Ovid had little doubt about his own powerlessness. ‘I see and approve better things, but follow the worse.’
Recognizing there is a problem here, we may put it down to a lack of moral fibre. Some like to think of addressing this deficiency in athletic terms: these things are too hard for us at present, but training and practice will make them achievable; maybe we can’t break the record for the high jump or 100 metres sprint at the moment, but if we keep on trying we’ll gradually become good enough to make the grade. Some prefer an educational model: we need to be taught how to be good, in much the same way as we are taught how to use a piece of software. Once we’ve mastered the technique, we’ll be fine.
This is a nice idea, and one that captured the imaginations of many in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. The ‘Age of Reason’ argued that reason and science liberated people from bondage to outmoded superstitions. And having broken free from the bonds of religion and other irrational ideas, humanity could set out on the upward path to enlightenment and moral perfection. Reason and science would put an end to conflict and social tension.
Of course, it didn’t work out like that. Our forebears might have been great at aspiring to social justice and world peace, but the massively destructive Great War of 1914 –18 put an end to this dream, exposing it as a sad and unsustainable delusion. The Enlightenment told us that war was caused by religion, and by giving up on religion, the world would become a safer place. Yet historians are agreed that religion played virtually no role in causing the Great War. Nationalism, pride, greed and utter stupidity were all major contributing causes to this devastating war. But not religion.
This leads us on to consider a darker possibility: is there something in human nature that inclines us to do evil, even when we pay lip-service to the good? That steers us to do things we know we shouldn’t do, or to fail to do the things we know we should? Much secular thinking about ethics is based on the assumption that we naturally want to do the right thing. But what if there is some fatal flaw within human nature that inclines us to do what suits our own agendas, when we know perfectly well that we ought to be doing something else?
In Christian theology, this flaw within human nature is called sin. In the remainder of this chapter, we will explore this theme in some detail.
The flaw within humanity: thinking about sin
The Christian faith has a rich notion of sin that it will probably be more helpful to describe than to define. In modern Western culture, some people find the idea of sin offensive, not because it is irrational (which it is not) but because it challenges the myth on which much of our culture has been constructed – that humanity is intrinsically good, and that it can achieve good unaided, without reference to God.
The ‘New Atheism’, well aware that the world is a mess, has an easy explanation for this state of affairs. The contradictions and failures of recent human history – that include the awkward arrival of the brutal totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Stalinism, not to mention weapons of mass destruction – are put down, somewhat implausibly, to the resurgence of religion. Yet both Lenin and Stalin saw the elimination of religion as one of their core objectives, so that they could create an atheist state.
There’s a real problem here for the New Atheism. First, it has to confront the very awkward fact that Marxism– Leninism, the atheist ideology on which the Soviet Union was founded, failed to persuade Russians that atheism was intellectually or existentially preferable to Christianity. In the end, Stalin had to resort to force to eliminate religion. The New Atheism, which is wedded to the idea that religion generates violence, thus has to come to terms with the atheist use of violence to enforce its unpopular ideas.9
Yet, more importantly, we need to recall what happened following the collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1990s. Christopher Hitchens seems to think that the Russian people were delighted to be liberated from religion and rejoiced in the new rationalist paradise of the Soviet Union. Yet the moment this unpopular state collapsed, religion rebounded. People were free once more to believe in God! It doesn’t fit the neat little slogans of the New Atheism, but it fits perfectly with the idea that we have a homing instinct for God that survives both repression and suppression.
Anyway, is human nature really as simple as these armchair philosophers suggest? Surely history shows up humanity’s failures and weaknesses, pointing to some inbuilt flaw in human nature? The real problem for secular rationalists is that, having made human beings the ‘measure of all things’ (Protagoras), they somehow have to account for the shocking brutality we have seen in recent decades, including mass genocides. If there is no god, the blame for this brutality lies firmly and squarely with humanity – the same humanity that these people believe is fundamentally good and rational. This issue regularly emerges as a topic of concern in historical studies of the First World War. How on earth did intelligent people in the world’s most advanced nations end up plunging into a massively destructive war, which nobody really won? The sheer senselessness and futility of war between highly industrialized nations had been demonstrated by Norman Angell in his pre-war bestseller The Great Illusion.10 Angell made an excellent case, but these nations still ended up going to war in what many historians now regard as a moment of collective irrationality.
Christianity is characterized by a profoundly realistic view of human nature and uses the word ‘sin’ to describe the flaws in human nature. Although the word is often rather simplistically defined in purely moral terms, as if the essence of sin was behaving badly, the truth is that sin is a deep-rooted malaise within us – something that’s built into our human identity. A Christian understanding of human nature avoids the fatalist belief that we can do nothing and the utopian delusion that we can do anything. Does this devalue human nature? Not in the least. It’s just being honest about the way things are.
Blaise Pascal spoke of the ‘grandeur and misery’ of human nature. On the one hand, we are inspired by our vision of goodness which draws us upwards; on the other, we find ourselves dragged down into the mud by our selfishness and foolishness. It is a familiar dilemma, famously articulated by Paul: ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Romans 7.19). Christian theology gives us a critical lens through which to view the complex motivations and mixed agendas of human beings. We bear God’s image, yet we are sinful. We are capable of good, but we are also capable of evil.
G. K. Chesterton was one of many to suggest that the Christian idea of sinful human nature seemed to be borne out in practice, while J. R. R. Tolkien’s poem ‘Mythopoeia’, written in 1931, points out the consequences of human sin:
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
Erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends.11
Nobody knew at this point the depths of depravity and cruelty that would be created by the rise of Nazism and Stalinism later in the 1930s. Yet Tolkien rightly saw that everything rests on the moral character of human beings, a theme he explored with particular acuity in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.
It was a normal service at the local church where I and my family worshipped. A student pastor, who was attached to the congregation for a few weeks to gain some experience, had been invited to give a talk to children on why selfishness is a bad thing. After saying some very predictable things in a very dull way, he invited the children to come to the front of the church, where he had a box of chocolates. He checked carefully to make sure that there were enough to go round, and then gave the box to one of the youngsters.
‘I’m giving you these chocolates! Now what are you going to do with them? There are enough for each of you to have one! And if there are any left over, you could give them to the grown-ups! That would be the right thing to do, wouldn’t it?’
‘I suppose so . . .’ the child replied. ‘You’re really giving them to me?’ The well-meaning student nodded, smiling. He was quite unprepared for the child’s reply. ‘Thanks, but I’m keeping them for myself.’
The child went back to his seat and started to eat the chocolates. The crestfallen student pastor looked on in despair. The second half of his talk was to have been entitled ‘The joy of generosity’. Wisely, he decided to abandon it. He hadn’t scripted anything on ‘The sin of selfishness’.
Christians have always recognized that sin is part of the human condition. The New Testament portrays it in several ways – such as a force that captures the human mind and will, a blindness that prevents us from seeing things as they really are, and guilt resulting from a failure to act properly. Although ‘sin’ is sometimes used in the sense of ‘an individual action’ (as we saw above), the New Testament tends to think of it primarily as a condition that leads to the commission of sin. We are slaves of sin (Romans 7.14), in the sense that we are held captive by sin, a force from which we cannot break free unaided.
It may be helpful to think of sin as an illness that has moral, relational and existential consequences. This approach builds on the healing ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, particularly his comment ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners’ (Mark 2.17). Suppose I had an illness that made me cough constantly in a way that was irritating for those around me. Not unreasonably, they might ask me to stop coughing! But I would have a problem. My coughing wouldn’t be something I could really control. It would be a symptom of my illness, and although I might find a way of suppressing things, the only effective way of stopping my cough would be to cure the illness that caused it in the first place.
This analogy brings out the point that individual sins arise from a sinful disposition. Or, to put it another way, acts of sin are symptoms of the real problem, which is our sinful state. To tell someone to ‘become good’ is a bit like telling a lame woman to start running. She might want to do so, but she is just not capable of moving swiftly unaided. The phrase ‘original sin’ is sometimes used to refer to the idea of having a sinful disposition from birth, which locks us into a pattern of bad behaviour. Some would suggest that sin is guilt, while others would argue that sin is better seen as an illness that causes guilt as one of its symptoms: our sinful condition leads us to do things that are wrong, and thus incur guilt. Our sinful condition also leads us to be alienated from God, and thus fail to become the people we could be.
How are we to make sense of this? Augustine of Hippo found the analogy of a biased set of scales helpful in explaining how human beings retain freedom on the one hand while being disposed towards evil on the other. We weigh things up and decide what to do. But what, Augustine asks, if the scales are loaded towards making self-centred decisions? They will still work, but they will give us bad results.
Augustine knew only too well that human beings tend to be self-centred. Why do we abuse our God-given freedom? Because our sinful nature leads us to see things wrongly and make bad decisions. This bias towards evil – or the lesser good, as Augustine occasionally puts it – is not something that can be corrected by education. Telling us to be good won’t help. We need to be healed, and then supported in our convalescence by the community of the Church, as we begin to adapt to the new way of life that results. The Christian gospel is what heals us – or at least what gets the process of healing started. The gospel is not a call to some form of moralism, a list of demands that we must meet; it is an invitation to be renewed and transformed, so that we want to do what is right. The gospel restores a proper way of seeing things, helping us mend the biased scales of judgement on the one hand, and renewing our will to serve God on the other.
There’s another way of thinking about sin that some readers may find helpful. Sin is about separation. Yes, it’s more than that – but the notion of separation really helps us to get our minds around what sin is all about. For a start, it’s about separation from God (Isaiah 59.2). This theme of separation is also significant in the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden (Genesis 3.23 –24). They would not be allowed to return to paradise, or experience again the intimate presence of God. The Old Testament prophets also portrayed sin as a barrier between humanity and God, expressed physically in the architecture of the Temple in Jerusalem by the heavy woven curtain or veil that separated the people from the Holy of Holies.
Many Christian writers have picked up on the significance of the tearing or rending of this curtain at the time of the death of Christ on the cross (Matthew 27.51). This is widely interpreted as indicating that the barrier between humanity and God is removed by the death of Christ (Hebrews 10.19 –22). J. C. Ryle, a nineteenth-century bishop of Liverpool who gained a reputation as a powerful preacher, had some important things to say about this:
The rending of the veil proclaimed the termination and passing away of the ceremonial law. It was a sign that the old dispensation of sacrifices and ordinances was no longer needed. Its work was done from the moment that Christ died. There was no more need of an earthly high priest, a mercy seat, a sprinkling of blood, an offering up of incense, and a day of atonement. The true High Priest had at length appeared. The true Lamb of God had been slain. The true mercy seat was at length revealed. The figures and shadows were no longer needed.12
Yet the image of separation helps us think about sin in other ways. For example, Paul speaks of God reconciling the world in Christ. As we saw in Lord and Saviour: Jesus of Nazareth, the idea of reconciliation is about the restoration of a broken relationship. Two people become separated from each other; redemption is about restoration of the relationship, enabling the two people to come together again. Their separation is over. Sin is about separation from God; redemption is about coming back to God – just like the prodigal son returning to his waiting father. Or we can think of sin as separation from our true destiny. As we have seen in this chapter, our true destiny is to embrace and be embraced by a living and loving God. Sin is about separation from this God; redemption is about being able to achieve what we were created for in the first place.
Despite what I have just been saying, some readers may still feel that Christians make rather too much fuss about sin. After all, most worship services include some form of public confession. Surely this is unhelpful? Isn’t it just getting obsessed with sin when we ought to be thinking about more positive matters? Let me try to set things in perspective. The Christian gospel – a word that means ‘good news’ – is not that we are sinful. The gospel is about the proclamation of hope and joy through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which we embrace through faith. It is about the life-changing realization that ‘the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones’ (Isaiah 49.13). It is the confident expectation of eternal life, grounded not on our own assurance or achievements but on the gracious gift of a loving God.
Where does sin come into this? Well, when we reflect on what God has done for us, we realize what a mess we were in. The light of the gospel exposes the shadows of sin. The Christian gospel enables us to see ourselves as we really are – sinful, yet beloved of God. The same faith that embraces the promises of a loving God comes to grasp the darkness, shallowness, distortions and failings of our previous way of life. The Christian faith enables us to see that something is wrong with us, and to name the problem – sin.
Some preachers try to begin by convincing us of sin and then showing how the Christian faith is able to deal with this. There is something to be said for this approach. In some ways it is like trying to prove the existence of God so that preaching the good news about God’s love is more plausible. Yet, as we noted earlier, the ‘god’ whose existence is proved by reason is rather anaemic in comparison with the ‘God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Similarly, to argue from ‘sin’ to the need for redemption often involves persuading people that they are immoral or failures, and then attempting to relate this to the Christian idea of sin. But this can easily lead to misunderstandings of what the Christian faith is all about. Sin is something that needs to be understood from the perspective of faith.
So how are our eyes opened so that we can perceive what the problem really is? How can we break free from a culture of denial that stops us from seeing ourselves as we really are? The New Testament makes it clear that spiritual blindness requires a spiritual cure. We need to be reborn and renewed through the work of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3.4 –7) in order to see ourselves as sinners and Christ as our Saviour.
As we shall explore in the next chapter, the Christian answer to the problem of sin lies largely in the idea of grace.