A shorter and similar version of this essay was published on the website of The Gospel Coalition Australia, titled The Importance of a God-Centred Doctrine of Sin, which can be read HERE.
One of the trickier challenges for Christians in any culture is disentangling our imagination from the framework given to us by the culture we live in. While believers may believe in God, call Jesus Lord, point to the achievements of the cross, acknowledge the dignity of humankind, and so on, they may not be doing so in a way fully formed by the “norming norm” that is the Bible. This goes for believers both new and established. What they understand by these may instead be colored more by the values of their culture, even unconsciously so.
This has been a challenge since New Testament times—consider, for example, the view the Corinthians had of the human body (revealed throughout 1 Corinthains)—formed more by Greek culture than by Genesis. Explorations in church history turn up more examples. This challenge highlights the necessity of being both acutely aware of how our own culture impacts our faith and practice, as well as deeply familiar with how Scripture would have us understand them.
So-called progressive Christianity is known for its revision of Christian teachings otherwise regarded as “traditional” or “conservative.” Furthermore, progressive Christianity tends to minimize doctrine and emphasise the imitation of Jesus in his care for the poor and the marginalised. This article presents a brief comparison of the way the doctrine of sin is formulated, and argues that progressive Christianity chiefly frames the doctrine in relation to humankind, rather than seeing it primarily in relation to God.
An Account and Assessment of a Progressive Doctrine of Sin
One popular progressive thinker, Roger Wolsey, has offered a rare account of how he as a progressive Christian articulates the concept of sin. I note his offering as “rare” because progressive Christians generally eschew doctrinal formulations, and moreover tend to minimize the importance of sin, thus diminishing the need to offer a sustained description of it. Wolsey’s essay, titled “A Progressive Christian view of Sin & Sinners,” was published in 2014 on the inter-faith website Patheos.
In Wolsey’s essay sin is largely described as a failure to do what is right, and highlights the human proclivity to hurt others and to do so against their own better judgement. In his words, humans are “busted and broken,” “cracked pots,” “imperfect vessels,” “beautiful messes,” who make “mistakes,” and that sin is “like an addiction” that leads to “self-sabotaging cliffs” from which Christian faith should guide us away from. When we sin, “we are causing suffering to ourselves and others.” Repentance is a process of transformation and reorientation, leading to such a dramatic difference in our persons that we can thus be said to be “born again.”
What is noteworthy about Wolsey’s description is what is absent. Largely, he describes sin as an offense against others and without an orientation toward God. He does at the outset highlight the nature of sin as “missing the mark” and elaborates that it is God’s will that is transgressed, and later notes that when we sin we are “out of communion with God.” However, nothing in Wolsey’s essay suggests that God’s will for us is anything other than human-centred. In this “progressive” presentation of sin, the idea that it is an offense against God himself does not surface.
There is discussion on a religious orientation to sin, but this is only to rebut it. Wolsey states that in Jesus’ day “sin had become reduced to legalistic notions about being ritually impure and ‘dirty’ and unworthy of participating in Temple practices.” He also regards the OT law simply as “some sort of retributive law books.” Absent is any acknowledgement that “through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20) or that the language of ‘uncleanness’ and its antithesis ‘holiness’ forms an intractable part of the barrier to human communion with God in both the Old and New Testaments.
Here is the most definitive statement on the nature of sin that Wolsey gives in his essay:
“Sin is disconnection from God and from whom we are meant to be. It is falling short of the mark of God’s initial aims for our lives… Sin is the extent to which we do not follow God’s initial aims or accept Her [sic] grace – choosing instead to go our own way out of communion with God. Sin means doing what we shouldn’t do and failing to do what we should. It means living falsely and contrary to reality. We sin when we are not seeing things the way they truly are thus we do not understand the full consequences of our actions in our “unreality.” If we did, we would not do them, because we would realize that we are only causing suffering to ourselves and others (including the fact that any time we cause suffering to others, we cause ourselves to suffer). Moreover, it seems that some of us, and therefore all of us, have it within us to knowingly do harm – even when we do realize that we are harming others or ourselves. Though some would argue that if someone does something that harms others or themselves, they don’t truly perceive things rightly and really wouldn’t do them if they really, and truly knew the consequences of their actions.”
A few points are worth highlighting out of this:
- Sin is described as falling short of the potential that God has instilled in individual human lives. This is largely a human-oriented framing of sin, although his description does include the intention that we have communion with God.
- There is no sense that we may not be permitted to approach God (such as is explicitly spelt out in Hebrews 9–10).
- His liberty in using a feminine pronoun for God rather than abiding in biblical terminology suggests a looser role for the Bible in its regulation of Christian faith and conduct—although that is another subject.
- Wolsey’s sense that sin means “living falsely and contrarily to reality” is agreeable to my own view, but from the rest of his essay the nature of that reality does appear to be more about how to live in relation to other humans rather than with much respect to God himself.
The God-oriented Framework of a More Orthodox Doctrine of Sin
Readers can make up their own mind as to whether such an articulation of sin takes full measure of its seriousness or whether the definition itself “misses the mark.”
My take is that sin is worse, not less, than what Wolsey proposes. His recognition that people sin against other people by what they do or fail to do is a correct but only partial account of how Scripture defines sin.
Compare this human-centre framework with Psalm 51, written in the aftermath of King David’s adultery and murder. In verse four David confesses to God that “against you only have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight.” Although he had seriously wronged several people, he recognised that the greatest offence was against God.
The context of the doctrine of sin matters. An orthodox doctrine of sin would place the doctrine within a wider framework of God as understood as holy and as central to our conceptual universe. Without proper reference to God, sin is collapsed into a human-centric framework that assesses the rightness or wrongness of actions in relation to human flourishing and personal wellbeing. This dulls the seriousness that should otherwise colour it. Arguably, this is little different to the secular ethic known as the harm principle, which deems as wrong only those actions which harm other people or their property.
Interested readers can explore well developed and comprehensive accounts of the doctrine of sin in the many quality introductions to Christian theology that are available in print. But one especially helpful description can be found in John Stott’s modern classic The Cross of Christ. In his chapter “The problem of forgiveness” (pages 106–109), he highlights several “vivid” metaphors the Bible uses to describe the offense of sin against God.
Stott points out that God in his holiness is high above us, and kept distant from us—inaccessible by sinful people (e.g. Isa 6:1; 57:15; Jos 3:4). God is also light that cannot be approached and fire that consumes—he is dangerously holy (e.g. 1 Tim 6:16; Heb 12:29). “Most dramatic of all” is the metaphor of vomiting, “probably the body’s most violent of all reactions.” God finds sin so disgusting that vomiting is deemed a fit metaphor for how he would treat it (e.g. Lev 20:22–23; Rev 3:16). Thankfully, our God is not only holy but he is also loving, and has provided his Son to atone for our sin so that we may be with him and not perish!
As Stott sums up,
“All five metaphors illustrate the utter incompatibility of divine holiness and human sin. Height and distance, light, fire and vomiting all say that God cannot be in the presence of sin, and that if it approaches him too closely it is repudiated or consumed. Yet these notions are foreign to modern man. The kind of God who appeals to most people today would be easygoing in his tolerance of our offences. He would be gentle, kind, accommodating, and would have no violent reactions. Unhappily, even in the church we seem to have lost the vision of the majesty of God. There is much shallowness and levity among us. The prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’.”
The example provided by Stott’s work demonstrates how a different theological framework for the doctrine of sin gives a different understanding of it (and arguably a better reading of the relevant biblical texts). This highlights the origin of the different conceptions of the doctrine of sin: different understandings of the character of God and his place in our overall conception of the metaphysical universe.
Conclusions
Thankfully our God is not only holy but also loving. A biblically-infused description of the atonement will reveal how the deep and multifaceted problems of sin are dealt with at the cross. Through it we are rescued from the guilt of sin, the punishment against sin, and the defilement of sin, and we are reconciled to the God who is affronted by sin.
A deficient doctrine of sin will require (or derive from) a different doctrine of God (especially regarding his holiness), a different doctrine of the atonement (not one of substitution), a different confidence in humanity (unwarranted optimism) and a different conception of the ills of the world and the solution to them. Most of all, a deficient doctrine of sin reveals a Christian worldview that is insufficiently shaped by what God has spoken through Scripture.
It is crucial to work towards a view of God and his world that is shaped by the revelation that God has given to us. Failing to do this will result in us being formed instead by the foundational assumptions of our culture, in which humanity is exalted and God is marginalized. Such failures are not unusual in the history of the church. Seeing it today needn’t be cause for panic, but it must spur us on to firmer efforts in discipleship, especially in the training of a critical Christian intellect and the formation of a Christian imagination. In post-Christendom times such as ours, the work of Christian pastors and teachers requires nothing less.
Chris Northcott 