Reclaiming Sin: Have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater?

Re-understanding Sin, and its role in our spiritual journey

For the wages of Sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:23 NIV

Article Summary: What if, amid Western culture's identity crisis, we have misunderstood the nature of Sin and thrown the baby out with the bathwater? What if the relationship we want with God requires a re-engagement with Sin and a different understanding?

—

Sin is a big deal in the Bible. It is mentioned approximately four hundred times. Beyond frequency, there is the enormity of its impact. Sin is the cause of the Fall, separating human beings from God and each other and bringing death, disease, and suffering into the world. For Christians, it is impossible to understate the centrality of Sin—yours and mine—and its consequences and that the only remedy is found in Christ.

So why do we hardly ever talk about Sin any more?

Sin is referred to in measured and regular rhythms of worship in liturgical churches. And some churches have continued a tradition, far less measured, of always mentioning it in psychologically destructive and obsessively guilt-inducing ways. Which likely gave rise to the general aversion to the subject.

I was a pastor for twenty-five years, and I can count on one hand the number of times people used the word "Sin" to describe something they had done. There were mistakes, regrets, and bad choices, but hardly ever sin. Indeed, in writing this, I wonder how often I label my sins as Sin.

I have heard TV/Media journalists try to trap religious leaders by mentioning Sin in interviews. "Do you think [insert behaviour] is a sin?" Just recently, it happened to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It always sounds strange when a non-Christian TV presenter uses the word "sin," like they are regurgitating something detestable and repulsive. The religious leader sensing a trap is usually evasive. Otherwise, they risk being pilloried for being judgmental if they concede anything as sinful or will be found wanting by Christians if they say it is not—the poor Archbishop’s response was a QED.

Of course, a conversation with a journalist or presenter would be better, but they can only stick to their talking points and their need for a 'gotcha'. If put in that situation, I would ask: What do you think Sin is? For they and we seem to have misunderstood Sin.

So, how did we end up where we are? Is there a more helpful and different way to understand and approach Sin? Let’s set the scene before we can get to a plausible and, I hope, compelling remedy.

Justification: A Forensic Problem

I became a Christian in a protestant evangelical setting. I was quickly inducted into explaining the Gospel as a sin-based courtroom punishment-paying process, known as penal substitutionary atonement.

The penal substitutionary view of the atonement holds that the most fundamental event of the atonement is that Jesus Christ took the full punishment that we deserved for our sins as a substitute in our place and that all other benefits or results of the atonement find their anchor in this truth.

The broader doctrine of substitutionary atonement is part of why Christ died and is evidenced in the Bible. I won’t review discussions about different views of atonement here, and good biblical scholars have done so very helpfully already.¹ But I will pick some symptoms and issues around atonement that I believe have had unintended consequences about our approach to Sin.

My wife grew up in the Brethren, and some of the stories she tells cause my toes to curl, of the culture of guilt, shaming and judgementalism that set people against each other and in hiding from God. Now, not every evangelical church goes to such extremes. But even if they are nuanced about a forensic view of Sin, such a view often has harmful emergent consequences. Core to penal substitution is the notion that it rectifies a breach in our relationship with God. Yet, due to its non-relational transactional nature, penal substitution, on its own, removes us from a relationship, reduced to a legal transaction with a wrathful and angry God. Some formulations of penal substitution declare with delight how God cannot bear to look at us due to our sins but how in Christ, when he looks our way, he sees his Son, not us. No wonder such construals have harmful psychological impacts.

Making the Gospel all about penal substitution displaces us from our relationship with God and each other. It sets us in a heavenly courtroom, with Christ paying the penalty for some punishment due to us for our sins. But who we are is unchanged. Our internal being remains the same. Various doctrines of sanctification have been created to account for how a person once acquitted in the heavenly courts - justified- might have their moral identity worked upon. Heart and life changes happen after justification in the heavenly courtroom (in many differing ways according to Lutherans, Baptists, Methods, Anabaptists, Pentecostals, etc.)

In practice, we often readily accept justification, but sanctification remains optional. Dallas Willard called this out as bar-code Christianity. We profess faith in Christ, get a bar code stamped upon us, and are scanned into heaven upon death as if who we are and have become internally is of little consequence. In the Gospels, Jesus seems to spend more time on our internal condition than on what happens when we die. The debate on the relationship between justification and sanctification is beyond this article. But I mention it because people like Willard have diagnosed how humans abuse the good news of justification by faith in making sanctification optional.

Responses to a forensic-only view of sin often take three forms:

• Proneness to guilt and shame

• Day-to-day ignoring of Sin as being all dealt with

• Giving up faith for psychological well-being and safety

On a more personal level, I have a new grandson and find myself correlating him to many of my current considerations. If someone abused and killed my grandson and were convicted, I’m not sure I could accept someone else serving their prison sentence.  

The Birth of Individualism

The Protestant Reformation was one of the main antecedents for the development of the rise of individualism and the notions of identity we have today. Sin, within a Protestant Reformation forensic view, moved the focus of Sin to the individual. It forced giving a personal account before God of belief for salvation.

A sinner who experiences psychological guilt over their sins discovers and generates a wider psychological affective dimension to their identity.² In other words, attending to an inner realm and making an account of God directly leads to more inner affective experiences and considerations. Not that Martin Luther would have understood our current notions of a modern person talking about their psychological selves, but he started the ball rolling down the hill as perhaps the patron saint of individualism.

But what if there is a different way of understanding Sin that is true to the relational aspirations of previous articulations, one that meets us at the level of modern psychology of the individual? We cannot turn ourselves back into premodern people or any other type of person in history. We also cannot claim that one type of understanding of self and identity is better than another. God in Christ meets us as the people we are in our time and place. That is part of the glory of the incarnation; God always first comes to us as we are.

So, how might God approach modern, affectively and psychologically driven selves in ways that involve a life-giving apprehension and appreciation for Sin?

Waking Up to Ourselves: How Sin Fractures Consciousness

St. Ignatius, on his conversion, became obsessed with his sins. Confessing them and reconfessing them became a dangerous and damaging habit that led to him being suicidal. Such obsessional fears about Sin were common in his time and were labelled 'scrupulosity'.  This was a kind of religious OCD with guilt and anxiety about moral issues. Ignatius's confessor seeing the harm this was causing, commanded Ignatius to cease his obsessive ascetics. Then, simultaneously, Ignatius discovered something in his encounters with God relevant to us today:

...that simply detailing and confessing his sinful habits and addictions was not dismantling and disarming them. That would require going deeper to their source in his heart and history. Only in these deeper recesses could he confront the pattern of spiritual and psychological dysfunction most responsible for eroding his freedom and distorting his authentic human nature."³

A forensic accounting of our sins does not transform us and does not deal with our hearts—the most profound aspects of our core identity and being require something more. Confession is meant to be a portal into a relationship with Jesus. In an Ignatian paradigm, Sin is about our addictions and our attachments to things other than God, from the stories that fuel our imaginations. Sin is evidence of our anti-story, the story of a life made away from God. Confession is where we discover our true story of being God made and becoming free to live for Him in the way he intended us to be.

As William Watson, S.J., puts it:

God has no interest in the facts of your past as evidence against you. God is interested in these facts in how they fractured your consciousness, eroded your freedom or masked your true identity.  Jesus wants to know what robbed you of peace. He wants to know what broke your heart and the hearts of others. God desires that you have knowledge about your life that is knowledge of the heart.  Because God is Love and master of the heart. Watch, listen and pray, without condition, without judgment. Ask for knowledge of the heart. Ask for knowledge of God’s heart as you uncover these mysteries of your life narrative that will become chapters in your Sacred Story.⁴

God is very aware of our past sins, but what if his principal interest in them was how they stop us from discovering and living into and out of who he made us to be? God loves us into being and wants us to be free from how Sin forms us away from Him. God meets us within this at our affective and psychological levels. The psychological and therapeutic self is where most people live and think about who they are in our cultural moment. Considering our sins this way allows us to understand how Sin stops us from being who we are meant to be.

Understanding Sin means reviewing our story and our hearts. What are our deepest desires for life, and who do we want to be? Undertaking such an examination of our hearts means talking to the God who loves us about this. Affectively, we are asleep to ourselves, and God wants to wake us up.

R T Kendall uses a metaphor about the church being asleep, which maps well onto an affective understanding of Sin. We are asleep to who we are and are meant to be. We do things in our sleep we'd never do when awake. We don't know we are asleep until we wake up and often do not like waking up.  But to be fully and truly alive, we must wake up.

Confession is waking up.

God’s invitation is gentle. God’s awakening is merciful. But God’s passion to pursue us, find us, help us and heal us is relentless.  The passion is Personal. The passion is Love. The passion is Christ Jesus.

To awaken is to find salvation and healing and to know how Christ's story can become ours for who we are and what we live for. The enemy, Satan, the great liar, will invite us to live any story other than the one Christ has for us. Christ will work against anything we bring to him that stops our human nature from being found in him. Considering our Sin is to discover what stops us from finding Him.

Punished with a Kiss

Despite his bout of the 'scruples', Ignatius does not shy away from Sin. The first week of his Spiritual Exercises reflects on the reality of Sin and our need for a saviour.  Ignatius couched this reflection as one where we consider our stories and personal histories and where Sin has disordered them. We are invited to discover the God who loves us and calls us into our true story. Confessing our sins is the first step to being freed into God's Love for us.

As I consider my faith, I am grateful that the youth leader who led me to Christ invited me to follow Jesus and exchange my life, plans, and past for one where "I would have something to live for, die for, meaning, adventure and purpose, every day of my life". My sin has always worked against that salvation story and sought to create an anti-story. To repent means to realise how my sin has disordered me and moved me away from my story with God and to return to my adventure in Christ. Original Sin is part of the human condition, and to refuse to accept that is to refuse the givenness of my identity with God. The greatest lie of the enemy is that I am free to create myself into any image I want to and, even worse, expect God to comply with my directions to him about my self-creations.

I have felt contrition, as I should, about my sin. The literal meaning of contrition is 'crushing'. It is right for God to let me feel the weight of the pain my sin causes and then experience the relief of Christ lifting that off me and onto himself. I do not find myself or self-actualise, but when I return myself to him in Love, He creates me and continues my story.

The God who appears within an affective conception of Sin in this article is very different from that of the courtroom. He is perhaps more like the one St. Thérèse came to know and love (and she took Sin very seriously). For when we take Sin seriously and also in the proper manner, we too might discover what St. Thérèse did, of being punished with a kiss:

I would like to try to make you understand by means of a very simple comparison how much Jesus loves even imperfect souls who confide in Him:

I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient, and when he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart the feeling that hedeserves to be punished; and his brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father’s arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it he will be good from now on, and if this child asked his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows.  He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by the heart . . . . I say nothing to you about the first child, dear little Brother, you must know whether his father can love him as much and treat him with the same indulgence as the other . . .⁵

1. See Dr Steve Burnhope, Beyond the kaleidoscope: towards a synthesis of views on the atonement.

2.  Affect, in psychology, is the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood.

3. Williams Watson S.J., Sacred Story: An Ignatian Examen For The Third Millennium.

4. Williams Watson S.J., Sacred Story.

5. St. Therese of Lisieux, Letter to Fr. Maurice Bellière, July 18, 1897, In: Idem, p. 1153.