The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View . . .

THE REALITY OF SIN

One of the most poignant titles ever given to a book was Karl Menninger’s Whatever Became of Sin?, a 1972 publication. As a psychiatrist Menninger concluded that man’s inhumanity to man cannot be explained simply in terms of deprivation, poverty, and ignorance. There is more involved than mental illness. There is something desperately wrong with the human race, the doctor points out, and the explanation is theological. and so he asked those seeking an answer to the human predicament as to what happened to sin.

One theologian likens our insensitivity to sin to a lady at a garden party being told that an escaped lion was but a short distance away, who responds “Oh, yes” as she nonchalantly takes another cucumber sandwich. The idea of sin has not only become old-fashioned but it has no real meaning to the modern mind. It is only “Sunday school talk” or something ignorant preachers harangue about, and has no relevance to the crucial issues of the twentieth century. The truth is there is no way to understand twentieth century man or to have an adequate world outlook apart from a realistic view of sin.

The problem is not so much that people have no concept at all of sin, but that their view of it is distorted, and the church itself is partly responsible for this. A case in point is that when a group of our youth got together to watch John Wayne’s True Grit, the adults insisted that someone sit by the controls and turn down the volume when foul language was used. C. S. Lewis admonished us to realize that things like four-letter words and even unchastity and drunkenness are but “fleabites” in comparison to what he called “the great sin,” which is pride or self-conceit, which includes religious pride.

There are those sins that matter most, and Satan deceives us when we camouflage the real sins by attacking the fleabites. Jesus had this problem with the church of his day. The Pharisees were preoccupied with rules like eating only with washed hands. Jesus observed that only those things that enter a man’s heart can defile him, and in this context he named the sins that really matter: evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. These defile the soul, Jesus says, because they proceed from the heart of man. These sins have to do either with idolizing one’s self or using and abusing other people.

It is unfortunate that the world sees much of the church engrossed in pharisaical ethics while glossing over the great sins. This is evident in the “wet or dry” elections so common in Texas. The Baptists lead the fight and if one listened to the rhetoric he would suppose that it is beer-drinking that defiles the man, not unwashed hands. And yet in such campaigns it is “the great sin” of pride that is often evident on all sides of the issue, along with a strong dose of hate. And one scholar who has lingered long with the problem of sin insists that if one germinal term links all sins together it would be hate.

What have we done to the world’s impression of the church’s view of sin when Christians spend a fortune on a political campaign to keep beer out of a community, when no such dollars go to feed the hungry or aid the dispossessed of the world. And the church’s politics is often the pride of power and numbers (After all, the Baptist Church is the state church of Texas!), and the rhetoric is often hateful. Pride and hate over against beer drinking, or pantsuits or dancing or smoking pot! It has not been all that long since the lad home from college was despised for his long hair, while his thieving, covetous father, even as an elder, faired without censure.

So, if we make an impact upon the world in reference to this subject we must deal with the nature of sin, along with its cause, consequence, and cure. We are talking about a disease, humanity’s most fatal malady, one that destroys the soul as well as the body.

Sin is many things, but it is a thing, not some abstraction. Strictly speaking, there are only sins, not sin. It is not something inherited, but something thought, said, or done. It emanates from man’s will, his self-will, so that sin is basically inordinate self-love. While there are sins of both the flesh (carnality or sensuality) and the mind (emotional and intellectual), they all emanate from selfish pride. Gluttony and fornication are sensual sins, while deceit and slander are mental, but they all find root in man’s conceit.

Augustine sought to classify all sins as “carnalities” or “animosities,” and he concluded that the latter, which is really hate, is the more serious. Drunkenness and sexual aberrations are sins, Augustine would insist, but not as deadly as heartlessness and ruthlessness. It is noteworthy that most if not all of the seven deadly sins, catalogued by the medieval church as pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust, are more mental than fleshly. Since avarice is greed for possessions, and lust is inordinate sexual desire (even if licit), and gluttony is lust for food, these would appear to be strictly fleshly or carnal, but they are also mental in that the mind is distorting the rightful place of possessions, sex, and food. Things, sex, and food are no longer a beautiful part of life, properly attuned to other values, but they become life itself. In fact, these sins find no beauty in food, sex, or things. They are to be voraciously consumed for their own sake, and so become the point of life. This makes them thinking sins as well as fleshly, or wrongheadedness or perversity of thought.

If pride or inordinate self-love is the basic sin, it is because it chooses not to know God or to ignore him. This makes willful ignorance and rebellion the heart of sin. Man does not believe in a God who is to judge all creation because he does not want to. He wants to direct his own course and do his own thing, and be hanged with God. This is implicit in the way people live, as if there was no Creator to whom we are to give an account. This is defiant rebellion against our Maker, and it is the taproot of sin. We can become so self-important, so grossly conceited, that we find no place for either gods or devils. This is the meaning of ungodliness, which is a biblical definition of sin.

This is why sin has such little meaning in our secularistic, humanistic society. If there is no God, or if he doesn’t matter, then there is no sin or it does not matter. Sin is even taken lightly, the butt of jokes, especially lust. Sin is fun to our world, except for such sins as pride, envy, deceit. When we despise a conceited person, as most of us do (and it is no fun thing), we are at least moving within the shadow of the reality of sin.

If sin can be seen not only as criminal but also as betrayal, we get close to its true nature. It is one thing for a man to cheat on his wife, but something else for him to betray her. In cheating on her he might still love her (even if he loves himself more!), while in betraying her he is renouncing and repudiating her. Sin is betrayal against God, a repudiation of him who created us in his own image. And a betrayer, whether of wife, country or God, has a hard time finding his way back home. Usually he doesn’t care that much. He doesn’t know where home is.

As for the consequence of sin, it is by its very nature destructive. It destroys one’s self, in body and spirit alike, and it destroys his relationship with others. Moreover it kills something deep inside him, that mysterious unifying principle that makes him a person, so that he now sees life as alien and meaningless. “The wages of sin is death” is a dreadful verdict. Helplessness and hopelessness are often the result, even when one does not realize it. He turns to anesthetics such as a pursuit of things, sex, food, money, pleasure, which are only counterfeits of what he really needs. He is separated from God, the terrible consequence of sin. Certain sins especially, such as betrayal of a friend or a crime against a child, brings one into a crisis with God, even the unbeliever. One is not as much an unbeliever as is supposed when he cries out in his misery, “Oh, God, what have I done-” He must realize that he’s been doing it all along, and that it is only amidst crisis that he has an inkling of it.

The Scriptures make it clear that sin is both universal and inevitable. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” the apostle assures us in Rom. 3:23, and to account for the origin and inevitability of sin he draws upon the Old Covenant Scriptures, particularly the sin of Adam. “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men have sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Notice the phrase all men have sinned, which is the KJV rendition. Other versions, by omitting the have, imply that all men sinned in Adam. By including the have --- “all men have sinned” --- Paul is saying that we are all sinners, not because we sinned when Adam did, but because we too have sinned, apparently for the same reason Adam did, because we are human. We may inherit the consequence of Adam’s sin (death), but not the personal guilt of his sin. We are guilty because we have sinned.

As for the inevitability of sin, it is one of those stubborn mysteries that continues to baffle man. We might suppose that from the billions that are born there would be an occasional super saint that would commit no sin. We know that that is not the case. We sin because we are human beings, which is the reason Adam sinned. Calvin called it “original sin” or “inherent sin,” which may be all right if those terms mean that man by nature has not only a proclivity to sin but an unalterable bent toward sin. We may not be born sinners, not in the sense of being guilty, but we are inexorably destined to sin when we come into this world.

Reinhold Niebuhr, who captured the realism of sin more than any modern theologian, accounted for the inevitability of sin on the grounds of man’s finitude and his freedom to choose. Man sins because he is free and because he is man and not God. That explanation may be as good as any.

The cure for sin is as gloriously baffling as other facets of “the mystery of godliness.” We only need to believe it, not understand it. After indicting all men as sinners in Rom. 3:23, the apostle goes on to say, “They are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”

If the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life. The answer to sin is a gift from God. It is a gift, with nothing to be earned. The answer is Jesus Christ, whom God gave to sinful man, so that through his sacrificial death man might be set free from sin through their faith in him.

So man is saved from his betrayal of and rebellion to the God of heaven through his faithful response to what the Father has given, Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul, writing from a Jewish perspective, refers to this renewal experience as “the circumcision of Christ,” a circumcision made without hands, one that cleanses the heart rather than cuts away at the flesh, Then he says, “You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2:12).

So the answer to man’s predicament is a circumcision of the heart, which is the seat of sin. This is realized through faith in “the working of God” which is expressed in baptism, which is both a burial and a resurrection with Christ. These point up what is necessary for sinful man: he must die to his sins, and so he is buried (with Christ), and he must become a new creation, and so he is raised to a new life in Christ, symbolized in his resurrection from a watery grave.

But it is all the work of God, his gift and his grace, while man remains completely undeserving. “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways.” --- the Editor