WHAT IS SIN?
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Sin is an act or state of being that is somehow against God. This article will examine three words in that previous sentence, “against,” “state,” and “act” to explore the meaning of sin in our world. Although it has been marginalized in recent years as a way of speaking about suffering and misery (or co-opted by those with a very simplistic and authoritarian view of the word), sin contains within it the germ of the good news. This is because speaking of sin already implies speaking of God, and of a longer-lasting moral order that sin violates even while presupposing its goodness.
The Contraries of Sin
It is a simple statement but also one easy to miss: sin is against God. Wrongdoing might also be against a neighbor, as in a theft of their prized possession. Or it might be against the state, as in tax fraud. In order to reduce vigilante justice and personal vendetta, we modern people sometimes abstract wrongful acts against a neighbor to make them acts against the state. If Smith kills Jones, the court case is the State vs. Smith, so that Jones’ family need not prosecute for justice. So an act is immoral if it’s against a neighbor, criminal if it is against the state, and sinful if it is against God. Sometimes there is overlap between and among the categories, as in the case of murder. But harm to a neighbor is sinful because God loves that neighbor, cherishes them as God’s own, and wills the good for each creature. If I mock an acquaintance behind his back but his mother sees me, the mother is hurt at seeing her beloved mistreated. So too in sin is God wounded when human callousness lashes out to harm a beloved creature of God.
In what way is sin “against God?” Even though there are hundreds, consider just two metaphors (sin-nonyms??) for how to think about sin: it might be a debt owed to God’s honor, or a rebellion against God’s word.
“Honor” is an easy-to-understand, but hard-to-define concept. We might say honor is the name we give to the correspondence of intrinsic worth and recognized worth. That is, honor is shown when the value something has is matched by the value with which it is regarded. Because God has infinite intrinsic worth, to honor God properly is to regard God as highly as we can. This means to render what is pleasing to God, like offering a contrite and humble heart (Psalm 51:7), doing justice and loving mercy (Micah 6:8), or loving one another as Christ loved us (John 15:12).
To do anything less than this is to dishonor God. To dishonor someone creates a deficit—we exist to be in right relationship with one another, and part of that rightness is supplied by the proper showing of mutual honor. Everyone must have the honor they’re due. If I show someone less honor than they’re due, a natural deficit is created which must somehow be made up. I might even naturally put this in economic terms: “Sorry about that–I owe you one!” Or “Please let me make it up to you.” A break is created which must be repaired. This is true for my relationship with other people, and how much more so for God!
As Anselm of Canterbury puts it, “This is the debt which angels and men owe to God. No one who pays it sins; everyone who does not pay it sins. This is the sole and entire honor which we owe to God, and God requires from us. One who does not render this honor to God takes away from God what belongs to him… and to do this is to sin. Moreover, as long as he does not repay what he has stolen, he remains at fault.” (1) Honor, as a recognition of worth, lies then at the very heart of God’s own self, and its denial in sin is against the very core of God.
For Martin Luther (1483-1546), sin is against God not as a debt of honor, but primarily in the sense that it is against God’s Word. (2) Humans sin by refusing to believe that the word of God, as revealed and recorded in Scripture, is the truth about God and about humanity itself.
The human heart is so deep that we cannot investigate it ourselves. We therefore need the Word to show us the depth and nature of sin in our hearts. (3) We might know something about human sinfulness without the Word, but in Scripture God defines and delineates sin more clearly and comprehensively than we can merely by our own intuition.
Sin then is the replacement of God’s Word with one’s own, the substitution of a God-directedness with a kind of self-centeredness. Not without good cause, Luther is well remembered for talking about sin as cor incurvatus in se est – the heart turned in on itself. (4)
I remember sitting in an airport when an elderly woman stumbled and fell. A divider separated me from her so I could not help. There were many people closer, but all of them were hunched over, looking at their phones, unaware of her plight. This kind of “incurved” self, where we are inattentive to or unconcerned with the needs of others, is a good way to think about sin. What makes matters worse, according to Luther, is that our knowledge of this inwardly distorted orientation does nothing to help us amend it. We cannot do anything to repair the situation. God’s Word must continually come extra nos – from outside of ourselves – and reorient the sinner.
Becoming properly “exocentric,” oriented outwardly instead of egocentrically, is not a matter of effort, nor of knowledge. (5) As Luther scholar Paul Althaus puts it, “A man [sic] sins against God… even when he takes everything seriously, attempts to establish his own righteousness, and thereby shuts himself off from that righteousness which God wants to give. Man thus sins even when he does the best he can, even with his best works.” (6) The sinful human, then, is unwilling to let the ways of God direct their life, and is unable to believe the gospel truth that one’s true center lies outside of oneself, that one’s telos is blessedness in God’s mercy, and that Christ has, in a “joyful exchange” actually taken one’s sins onto himself and replaced them with his righteousness. (7)
Sin as State and Act
Most of us don’t begin evil anew, we simply continue evil begun elsewhere. In that sense, at least, sin is a ‘state of being.’ The context in which we are born is somehow fallen, or has gone awry, or is less than God the benevolent creator intends for it to be. This would be a kind of “minimalist” version of is what is meant by “original sin.” (8) Even when we try to honor God with our lives, even if we, by grace, do honor God’s law and believe the Gospel, even still we do so with imperfect understanding, weak wills, and distorted affections. We build with imperfect materials, because the raw materials we have inherited to work with bear the marks of past sin.
Sometimes an objection to the notion of original sin goes like, “But I wasn’t there a hundred years ago. I can’t be held responsible for what happened back then!” Of course in one sense that’s true – we inherit the sinful state enacted by others. But in another sense that’s simply an effect of a very individualistic understanding of human nature. Anyone who has been on a sports team knows (and likely hates) the time when the coach makes the whole team run laps because one or two people didn’t get the play right. It seems unfair to punish everyone when just a few messed up. But anyone who has coached a team knows that the spirit of the team is what causes individuals to act the way they do. If a player missed an assignment it’s likely because the bonds that hold the team together were weak enough to cause that assignment not to be taken very seriously. So the coach thinks about the “team” as the real unit of action, not just individual players. Some form of logic like that underlies original sin. God creates, relates to, loves and redeems humanity, first and foremost.
While we build our projects with imperfect materials, we cannot shirk responsibility for our own fault in building. We ratify sin in our daily actions. Even when we know what the right thing to do is, we shrug and shrink away. We neglect to intervene on behalf of those pushed aside. When we do act in a just cause, our motivations are often driven by false motives, like virtue-signaling, scapegoating, or self-interest. Chief among these is self-justification. We say to ourselves and others, “I’m fine. I did what I had to do. I wish things were otherwise, but I need to look out for me and mine.” When God confronts Adam about having eaten the fruit in Eden, he immediately justifies himself by blaming Eve, “the woman that you gave me!” (Gen 3:12) And then Eve passes the buck by blaming the serpent. And in some Jewish midrash, the serpent even blames God when confronted, saying that it’s God who made the serpent, after all. Sin is justifying oneself while scapegoating another.
Talking about sin today
Because the Bible is so rich in its use of metaphor and image by which to understand that which is contrary to God’s loving will for creation, the Christian is free to search for language that will speak powerfully to today’s problems and needs. Here are two options out of many:
First is the need to think of sin in not just moral terms, but also aesthetic terms. Sin is not just a violation of a church’s explicit teaching or even necessarily some “moral” failing. It is also a kind of ugliness, or blight. I have been confused but also impressed by my non-Christian students. When I criticize them for their lack of an enveloping moral framework within which to understand their lives’ directions, many point to beauty as the keystone in their understanding. They seek beauty in nature. They seek beauty in art. Their love of technology is not just for functionality, but for refinement in design. They are drawn to solutions for social problems that are not simply efficient or data-driven, but elegant and aesthetically satisfying, as well.
Sin as “blight” is evident, for example, in the horrors of environmental devastation. One doesn’t need a theory of eco-justice to know that blowing the top off a mountain to remove its coal is viscerally wrong, even sinful. Or to take an aesthetic approach to sin differently, consider how stunningly beautiful a true act of kindness can be. I recently read a note a customer found with her cake that she had purchased at a bakery. The cake had been paid for by a woman whose son’s birthday it was, but whose last seven birthdays had been spent in heaven. She honors her son’s memory every year by buying someone’s cake and encouraging them to hug their loved ones tight. Acts of such love are natural to humans, but their beauty is startling. It makes other common acts seem vulgar and ugly by comparison.
Second, I propose that Christians today should spend more time thinking about sin as “burden.” In doing so they would be picking up an important biblical image. When a person commits wrongdoing, their conscience afflicts them, and this can feel like bearing a burden of guilt. But the same is true of the collective. When one or more among its numbers sins, the collective also shares in the blame and thus also in the responsibility for the bearing and relieving of the burden.
The Hebrew term [‘wn], often translated “iniquity” is really the co-mingling of sin and the guilt that it causes. Guilt is understood here both as culpability and as a feeling of guilt, or the burden that being guilty places on oneself. Genesis 4:13, for example, quotes Cain regretting both his iniquity against God by killing Abel, and the punishment that he thereby incurred.
Very frequently the implication is that [‘wn] is like a heavy weight, or a burden. A common phrase that is translated “to forgive a sin” (nasa ‘wn) most literally means “to remove a burden.” We see this in such places as Genesis 50:17 and Exodus 10:17, where sins are forgiven by those humans who have been wronged. But bearing the burden of sin is something that also belongs to the very nature of God. The well-known passage from Numbers 14:18 reads, “The Lord is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression.” The last phrase there literally means “bearing away the burden of sin.” Sin is a weight that becomes, collectively speaking, so heavy that only God can carry the burden, and so ultimate forgiveness necessarily must come from God.
Cur Deus Homo, 1.11.3.
Luther still does make room for seeing sin as the dishonoring of God. Cf. WA 6:220, WA 18:742, LW 12:309, LW 2:125-6.
WA 39.23.
He does not use the expression as often as one might surmise given how central it is said to be to his doctrine of sin. He uses it mostly in his lectures on Romans (WA 56:304.26, 56.356.5).
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989), 71. Luther uses the phrase “extra se in Christo” to refer to the natural center that the Christian has in Christ, and making unnatural the self-centeredness of sin. See Wilfried Joest, Ontologie der Person bei Luther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967), 273-4.
Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schulz (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 149.
WA 7.25.26ff., WA. 401.443.23ff. See also Luther's Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. and trans. T.G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 110.
St. Augustine inherited and developed a theory of the human being in which the human was a material body joined to an immaterial soul. The soul was supposed to “rule” the body according to reason, and subject all the body’s activities to reason. But when the first soul was tainted with sin, Augustine argued, all souls that descended from that soul shared the same stain. Until Mary’s parents conceived her immaculately, then, no human soul could be produced without the stain of sin. What’s more, the stain of sin bears with it the wages of sin—death—and also a penalty, because the baby born in original sin is actually guilty of sin and in need of forgiveness through baptism. This would be something like a “maximalist” version of original sin.