This story therefore demonstrates that the sin of envy is not merely sin against another person. That is the way we tend to think of it, as purely horizontal. But the Bible suggests that envy is most basically sin against God. The vertical direction of despising the less fortunate. A third example of the vertical nature of sins we normally consider 'horizontal' comes from Proverbs.
Proverbs Throughout the Bible, we learn of many other sins that from a human-centered perspective are purely horizontal but from a God-centered perspective have a mainly vertical direction. Dishonoring and deserting one's parents and living a debauched life is sinning against God Luke Lying to other people is sinning against God Acts 5. The many sins of Sodom, among which were both sexual sins Genesis Undue fear of other people or circumstances is sin against God, as is presumptuous activity that moves forward without God's blessing Deuteronomy 1.
Grumbling against God's appointed leaders is in fact grumbling against God himself. Slander and deceit are sins against God Psalm Covetousness is sin against God Ephesians 5.
Sins that fracture the Christian community, such as unaddressed anger, corrupting talk, and bitterness, are sins against God Ephesians 4. The reason all sin is sin against God. This raises an important question: why is all sin in fact sin against God?
There are many reasons. I'll offer four. Sin against others offends God because he is their creator and values them, because he is your creator and has instructed you how to live, and because all sin calls God's character into question. First, sin against others offends God because he is their creator.
This truth is clearly indicated in Proverbs They bear his image. An offense against the creature is therefore an offense against the loving creator, just as a great sculptor is deeply offended if someone defaces or destroys his favorite creation. Walter Kaiser rightly claims that murder is a crime not just against another person but also against God: 'Murder, then, amounted to the shooting, mugging, or slaughtering of God himself in effigy.
Murder is so serious because it is a crime against the majesty of the divine image in each individual. No matter how disgraced or debauched a person may appear, they are not to be equated with disposable litter or seen simply as disheveled wretches of humanity; they are still made in the image of God and carry enormous intrinsic potential and significance. The Godward direction of sin includes not only harming the creature but also overly valuing the creature.
Why does Paul, in Ephesians 5. Because sexual lust, like other kinds of overwhelming desire e. Sin against others also offends God because God is your creator. Sin inhibits our ability to display God's image as we were designed by God to do. Moreover, the biblical doctrine of God as creator teaches that God continues to sustain his creation and hold it in existence.
In sinning, we misuse and abuse the existence God has given us and in which he sustains us moment by moment. Lewis expressed these truths clearly: ' We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument.
We caricature the self-portrait He would paint. Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege. As our creator, God has established rules for how we are to interact with our fellow human beings. When we resist those rules, we resist his authority as creator. Therefore, sin offends God.
He is the one who gave the commands and told his people how he wanted them to live I cited Leviticus 6. This passage claims that deceiving your neighbor financially or robbing your neighbor or pretending his lost property is your property is actually a breach of faith against the Lord. Why is this the case? We're given the answer just a few verses earlier in Leviticus. Leviticus 5. He has told us how to live, and we have disobeyed him.
If a father tells his little boy not to throw stones at the cat, and the little boy nonetheless throws stones at the cat, the boy's actions have caused a rift in his relationship with the cat and with his father. In fact, he has sinned against his father even if his aim is bad and he misses the cat. The same is true with Israel's sin of fear in Deuteronomy 1. Israel's fear of the inhabitants of Canaan is sin against God because it involves disobedience to the command of God 1.
Moses explains that Israel's refusal to enter the land was rebellion against the commandment of the Lord and a lack of trust in him. Sin against others offends God because sin is always saying to God that we know better than he how to make ourselves happy. For this reason, sin inevitably calls the truthfulness of God's plan and promises, and the goodness of his character, into question. It says to God: 'You're a liar. The case of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram in Numbers 16 illustrates this.
In Numbers Therefore, for Korah and the others to assert themselves against Moses and Aaron is to challenge God's wisdom in placing each person where he wants them.
Their challenge against Moses and Aaron is therefore sin against God. In envying Moses and Aaron, they are essentially saying to God, 'Your allotment of responsibility is deficient.
You should have given us more responsibility. Whenever we envy a person who has better looks or a bigger brain than we do, we are saying to God whether we mean to or not , 'You should have made me different. In The Art of Divine Contentment , the Puritan Thomas Watson claims that, 'murmuring is rising up against God, for thou settest thyself up against God, as though you were wiser than he. We consider every blow, 'And why has this happened?
From a poisoned heart; as if we said, "The thing should have been otherwise, I see no reason for this. This is how men exasperate themselves. And in this what do they do? It is as if they accused God of being a tyrant or a hairbrain who asked only to put everything in confusion.
Such horrible blasphemy blows out of the mouths of men. This is dangerous ground upon which to tread. Isaiah Trusting in God's wisdom and provision punctures the power of the sin of envy. Finally, sin against Christians is sin against God because God has redeemed his people.
In 1 Corinthians 8. Before absolutely prohibiting feasting in temples which he does in One should refrain for the sake of one's brother, in order not to make him sin against his conscience by doing what he believes to be the wrong thing.
Paul says that if this 'weak' brother does what he believes is wrong, he is 'destroyed. Paul then establishes the seriousness of causing one's brother to stumble: 'Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ ' 8. Why a God-centered perspective on sin is so important. The reason it is crucial to have a God-centered perspective on sin is that we're in a tough fight against a wily enemy. Satan deceives us John 8.
In one meeting with a couple who had recently begun attending our church, it became clear that, despite their emphasis that they loved God's Word and were hungry for robust biblical preaching and teaching, they were unmarried and living together. There was obviously a serious disconnect occurring here between belief and practice: sin was deceiving them and they were deceiving themselves. The measure of sin's deceitfulness is its power to produce these strange blind spots and juxtapositions in our lives and unfortunately, examples abound.
A young John McCain bravely endures many years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, returns home as a war hero, and begins a series of extramarital affairs. The intrepid, trustworthy, larger-than-life Sir Ernest Shackelton carries on an extramarital affair over a long period of time. The Bible is full of stories of men and women with equally terrible blind spots, and if we take a long, honest look at ourselves we will find them in our own lives. We live with these juxtapositions because sin deceives us and we swallow the lie.
John Owen wisely said, 'Without sincerity and diligence in a universality of obedience, there is no mortification of any one perplexing lust to be obtained.
Like all lies, sin multiplies at an alarming rate, one sin quickly leading to another. Sin rarely travels alone; it prefers to travel in packs. For example, adultery almost always requires deceiving one's partner.
Frank Pittman is onto something when he claims that: 'The infidelity [of an affair] is not in the sex, necessarily, but in the secrecy. It isn't whom you lie with. It's whom you lie to. The point is, they go together. One leads to the other. Our enemy sin is devious and fast-growing. Therefore, we must know it well. We must have a God-centered view of it. If we really grasp this perspective, it will help us enormously.
Here are the some of the ways a God-centered view of sin will help us. We sin more readily against people when we believe they have no chance of repaying our wrongs. One of the many reasons it is tempting to be rude toward telemarketers and bad drivers in traffic is that we will likely never see them again.
Hence, we're almost invariably more impatient and less forgiving toward such people, because we believe they can't pay us back. This deeply mistaken position is revealed for the lie it is by the truth that all sin is sin against God. Because all sin, including so-called 'horizontal' sins, has a Godward direction, there is no sin that God does not care about. Every sin must be paid for, either at the cross by Jesus, or in eternity by the sinner.
God demands it. When I was a boy my brothers and I put burrs into the hair of the little girl who lived next door. We thought that was very funny, because she couldn't get back at us. But when she went home and told her mom, who got angry and called our parents, the situation quickly escalated from funny to serious.
We will do well to remember that sin angers God and provokes the vengeance of Jesus Christ 2 Thessalonians 1. God has no further preparations to make for the final judgment; he is 'ready' to judge the living and the dead 1 Peter 4. We're also more tempted to commit certain sins when we believe they are relatively trivial and insignificant. The doctrine of original sin also clearly has social implications: if all human beings suffer from original sin, then their social interactions will be impacted by it.
Even Swinburne, who rejects that humans suffer from original sin in a way that makes sin inevitable to us, holds that we contribute to the proneness of our communities to sin such that we are involved in the sins of our communities Swinburne These forms of sin affect our relationships, not just between individuals and other individuals, but between individuals and groups and between groups and other groups.
In short, sin corrupts the moral imaginations of not just individuals, but of entire communities. We can also think of sin, however, not just in terms of individual acts and attitudes, but in terms of social structures.
The sixth century Byzantine monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor, for instance, held that sin leads to a breakdown in community, leading to individualism and social fragmentation. He went so far as to compare this state to a kind of bestiality Deane-Drummond Henri de Lubac interprets Maximus as understanding.
It has seemed plausible to many others as well that sin can be embedded within social structures such that it is committed by groups and not just individuals. Sin thus impacts not just individuals or groups, but the very nature of our social systems themselves:. When sins such as pride, greed, and covetousness infect those who legislate for society, as they almost always do, the legislation and resulting social structures are themselves corrupt, and will produce often predictable pathologies in society: poverty, racial segregation, destruction of lives and relationships in the name of profit.
On this view, human structures and systems as well as human nature are marred or distorted by sin. This approach to sin is often found in liberation theologies see McCall ff. Consider, for instance, racism.
McCluskey , chapter 6 contains a discussion of racism as involving not only bad actions but also bad habits:. A common habit among whites is to check that their car doors are locked whenever they see an African-American walking on the street while they are driving. Seeing a white person walking does not trigger the same response.
Underlying this habit is the unacknowledged judgement by the privileged white group prevalent in a racist society that blacks, especially young black men, are criminals and therefore to be feared. Racial profiling by the police leads to stopping persons of color on a habitual basis simply because of their skin color and is also grounded in the explicit or implicit belief that members of these groups are more likely to commit crimes. McCluskey ; citations omitted.
Those instances of racism that are caused by willful ignorance or resistance to self-scrutiny will also reflect the epistemic dimension of sin. But beyond this, it may be that racism is an example of an irreducibly structural sin, as Stephen Ray argues. Racism, like race itself, on his view, is socially constructed. This holds for two important reasons, one of which regards the existence of oppressive structures and the second about how their existence is masked:.
First, … is the realization that sin becomes apparent in structures through the material consequence of their operation. Ray The forces that result in antiblackness are inherently social e. A number of theologians also explore victim-oriented soteriologies that focus primarily on the plight of individuals who are victims of institutional oppression and injustice, trying to articulate what reconciliation looks like in those settings see Hunsinger and Hieb A number of feminist scholars have also argued that sexism can be understood along the lines of structural sin.
Many of these scholars see traditional approaches to sin as individualistic action or disposition to be problematic and harmful to women see, for instance, the work of Saiving , Plaskow , and Dunfee for historically influential examples. Baard argues that sin-talk contributes to communal praxis, shaping where and how our practices reproduce themselves.
As she puts it, our language and understanding of sin creates a script that people perform; for instance, if sin is simply understood as individual actions, then it would encourage us not to see the social structures involved in patriarchy as sinful, thereby making it more likely that those structures continue rather than addressing them as problematic.
Traditional understandings of sin rooted in pride, she continues, which lie at the heart of many Christian institutions, and cultural beliefs and practices,. Baard 49; see also Jones If all sin is ultimately rooted in pride and self-exertion, the proper response to sin is found in humility and self-sacrifice.
But in situations of oppression and gender-based violence, such a response encourages further harm and a denial of proper agency:. Baard This can be seen historically in how women have been blamed for sin, and that blame then used to deny opportunities for or justify violence against women. Baard argues that a shift to a rhetoric of the systemic nature of oppression rather than pride is often called for, shifting focus away from the purported moral failing of the individual to the androcentric rhetoric and practices that perpetuates structures that oppress.
In addition to racism and sexism, other social forms of oppression can also be understood as examples of structural sins. Leigh Vicens suggests that we can understand implicit bias as a kind of socially based structural sin Vicens ; for a recent discussion of the state of research on implicit bias, see Brownstein, Madva, and Gawronski Marjorie Suchocki argues that sin is. Suchocki She uses this account to illuminate oppression, economic systems, and homophobia.
Patriarchy can perhaps be understood in a similar way see Baard and Ruether And Ruth Groenhout explores the relationship between systemic sin and contemporary healthcare systems Grouenhout Anselm, Saint [Anselm of Bec, Anselm of Canterbury] Aquinas, Saint Thomas atonement Augustine, Saint Christian theology, philosophy and compatibilism creation and conservation evil: problem of forgiveness free will: divine foreknowledge and God: concepts of heaven and hell in Christian thought incompatibilism: nondeterministic theories of free will incompatibilism: arguments for moral responsibility providence, divine social institutions voluntarism, theological.
Approaching Sin within a Religious Tradition 1. Sin as Action 2. Sin as Disposition 4. Sin as State 4. Noetic Effects of Sin 6. Philosophers who have adopted such theories have tended not to speak of sin, but of moral agency and responsibility, of moral goodness or turpitude.
Adams 1 McCord Adams herself thinks this assumption of neutrality is unjustified, however, citing the significant difference in ontological commitment between theists and atheologians, and the implications this difference has for their moral theorizing: Different ontological commitments with their different stores of valuables widen or narrow the range of options for defeating evils with goods.
Adams ; see also Plantinga 36 In short, the degree to which a belief system can make sense of a particular claim or theory depends on the resources within that belief system see Hasker 17—19, Sin as Action One of the most common ways in which sinful actions have been characterized is as actions in conflict with the behaviors and patterns of life to which God calls humanity.
Ruth Groenhout, for instance, describes sin as the deliberate choice of a lesser good in preference to a greater, chosen in spite of and against the loving, creative, and wholly good will of God.
Groenhout Groenhout here is drawing on a tradition that goes back at least to Augustine, according to which sin necessarily involves inordinate desire for a lesser good. According to Philip Quinn, Theists who believe that erring conscience binds will want to allow for cases in which, on account of a mistaken belief about the moral wrongness of an action, a person does what is subjectively but not objectively wrong and so sins subjectively but not objectively.
MacDonald —1; see also Rogers and Couenhoven chapter 1 The very notion of a primal sin implies that there was a time when creation was without sin. Boyd argues, given that it conflicts with contemporary science, the claim that creation was originally perfect in every respect—the idea that an idyllic paradise existed without death, disease, poison or weeds before the first human [or angelic] sin—is especially problematic.
Boyd But one need not take the story of the fall literally to think that there was a primal sin. Rogers 97 On this sort of view, any attempt to fully understand the primal sin falls short and must ultimately remain mysterious and irrational.
As MacDonald describes the situation: What could primal sinners have done to guard against sinning? In fact, at one point he claimed that most attempts to explain why God permits evil—theodicies, as we may call them—strike me as tepid, shallow, and ultimately frivolous. Plantinga 35 His later Warrant and Christian Belief is an extended response to defeaters to Christian belief, but it also contains the elements of his later O Felix Culpa theodicy.
As Kevin Diller comments, this argument is a new species from Plantinga in the genus of responses to the problem of evil. Diller 90 He continues: Unlike a free will theodicy, in a [ O ] Felix Culpa theodicy God desires evil [perhaps not for its own sake but] as a means to his good purposes. The way Plantinga understands the supralapsarianism, the [divine] decree to save [at least] some of the fallen [via the incarnation and atonement] precedes the decree to permit sin.
The Strong Value Assumption is as follows: Any world with incarnation and atonement is a better world than any without it—or at any rate better than any world in which God does nothing comparable to incarnation and atonement. Plantinga 1 More fully: No matter how much sin and suffering and evil [world] W contains, it is vastly outweighed by the goodness of God, so that W is a good world, and indeed a very good world. Plantinga 9f Plantinga thinks that since all possible worlds containing the goods of incarnation and atonement also contain moral evil, the introduction of sin into the world is justified by those goods.
Marilyn McCord Adams, for instance, writes, In fact, as the great medieval theologians recognized, Incarnation and atonement are logically independent: all agreed, it would have been metaphysically or logically possible for God to become Incarnate, even if creatures had never sinned; and Incarnation without atonement would still have been cosmic excellence enhancing. Diller 90 Diller argues that intimacy and solidarity are made possible by the incarnation. But these goods could be achieved even without sin and the need for atonement: the incarnation alone does not require suffering and evil, so neither then is evil required for enhancing the intimacy of human relationship with God.
Diller 96 For his theodicy to work, Plantinga would need to argue that it is the good of the atonement in particular that assures the relevant goodness, thereby revising the Strong Value Assumption to something like any world with atonement is a better world than any without it—or at any rate better than any world in which God does nothing comparable to atonement see also Hudson Diller 92; citations omitted Marilyn McCord Adams rejects the entire framework of the instrumental value of evils that the O Felix Culpa theodicy assumes.
Diller 94 McCord Adams argues that it is actually worse than Diller thinks. Hasker f But that glory might not even be for saving those individuals that sin, since Plantinga thinks that not all who sin are saved. Plantinga writes that any world with incarnation and atonement is better than any world with it—or at any rate better than any world in which God does nothing comparable to incarnation and atonement.
Sin as Disposition In addition to being a category of action, sin can also be understood as an inclination or disposition to engage in sinful action.
As Plantinga puts in, sin is also and perhaps primarily an affective disorder or malfunction. Plantinga The relation between sinful acts and sinful dispositions is complex. On this view, sin is fundamentally an impropriety in the relation between God and created person. Couenhoven 46; for slightly different categorizations, see Blocher and Crisp chapter 7 Of these, 1 has already been dealt with above in section 2.
As Augustine puts it, The first human beings … having become the first sinners, were then punished by death in such a way that whatsoever sprang from their stock should also be subject to the same penalty.
The realist view perhaps best known is that of Jonathan Edwards, who held that all humans are one simply because as God declares us to be: there is no identity or oneness [that does not] depend on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator.
III [ ] Influenced by Jonathan Edwards, a number of philosophers have suggested that the theory of perdurantism might provide a basis for realism. As Paul Copan puts it, though we do not sin necessarily that is, it is not assured that we must commit this or that particular sin , we sin inevitably that is, in addition to our propensity to sin, given the vast array of opportunities to sin, we eventually do sin at some point.
On these views, the following claim is true: 1 Necessarily in a world tainted by original sin, a every human subsequent to Adam and Eve [where those names are understood to refer to whoever the first sinners happen to be in whatever world is tainted by sin] is born in a condition such that it is inevitable that she sin given that she performs at least one morally significant action , but b it is not inevitable that she sin on any given occasion.
Franks , 6f; citations omitted This claim would seem to entail that every world tainted by original sin includes sinners who give birth to other creatures capable of sinning. This would mean that: 2 Possibly, some human performs only one morally significant action in her lifetime. That is, it follows from 1a and 2 that 3 If some human performs only one morally significant action in [their] lifetime, then that action is inevitably sinful. Franks 7 However, from 1b it follows that: 4 If some human performs only one morally significant action in [their] lifetime, then that action is not inevitably sinful.
Franks 7 3 and 4 together entail a contradiction. Noetic Effects of Sin The depravity brought about by sin is held to affect all parts of human nature. Plantinga For Plantinga, religious belief can be immediate and basic; a religious belief can be warranted even if it is not held on the basis of argument, so long as it is reliably produced by the sensus divinitatis.
Following Augustine, Westphal also sees sin as best described in terms of pride, the self-assertion which usurps a role in life not proper to me, depriving God and neighbor of their rightful places as, respectively, my absolute superior and my equal. Structural Sin The discussions of sin in the previous sections all have social implications insofar as sin qua action, disposition, state, and epistemic factor can all harm human community.
Henri de Lubac interprets Maximus as understanding original sin as a separation, an individualization it might be called in the depreciatory sense of the word.
Groenhout Sin thus impacts not just individuals or groups, but the very nature of our social systems themselves: When sins such as pride, greed, and covetousness infect those who legislate for society, as they almost always do, the legislation and resulting social structures are themselves corrupt, and will produce often predictable pathologies in society: poverty, racial segregation, destruction of lives and relationships in the name of profit.
Groenhout On this view, human structures and systems as well as human nature are marred or distorted by sin. McCluskey , chapter 6 contains a discussion of racism as involving not only bad actions but also bad habits: A common habit among whites is to check that their car doors are locked whenever they see an African-American walking on the street while they are driving.
McCluskey ; citations omitted Those instances of racism that are caused by willful ignorance or resistance to self-scrutiny will also reflect the epistemic dimension of sin. This holds for two important reasons, one of which regards the existence of oppressive structures and the second about how their existence is masked: First, … is the realization that sin becomes apparent in structures through the material consequence of their operation.
Baard 49; see also Jones If all sin is ultimately rooted in pride and self-exertion, the proper response to sin is found in humility and self-sacrifice. Baard 61 This can be seen historically in how women have been blamed for sin, and that blame then used to deny opportunities for or justify violence against women. Marjorie Suchocki argues that sin is participation through intent or action in unnecessary violence that contributes to the ill-being of any aspect of earth or its inhabitants. Suchocki 12 where that participation is part of our inheritance thorough social solidarity with other sinful humans.
Bibliography Abraham, William J. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Priorities Among the Reasons? Johnson eds. Alston, William P. Anderson, Gary A. Aquinas, Summa theologiae , translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, second and revised edition, Dyson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Barrett, Justin L. Murray eds. Black, C. Boyd, Craig A. Oord ed. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, — Brown, Robert F. Burge, Gary M. Cavanaugh, William T. Smith eds. Crisp, Oliver D.
Flint and Michael C. Rea eds , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. Stump and Meister 35— Davis, Brian and W. Reprinted in The Works of Jonathan Edwards , vol. Franks, W. Green, Joel B. Hieb, Nathan D. Johnson, Keith L. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, New York: Harper Torchbooks, Katz, Steven T. Katz ed. Stump and Meister 78— Stump and Meister 11— Mann, William E. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. McCann, Hugh J. McFarland, Ian A.
Moffitt, David M. Morris, Thomas V. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen eds. Reidel, 3— Porter, Steven L. We can only sin against God. Only God is holy, only God is good. He prescribed righteousness and proscribed rebellion, and both righteousness and rebellion find their meaning in God. He is the standard. He is the mark. We hurt each other when we lie, cheat, and steal, and the pain we endure is very real. In no way am I minimizing the thorny effects of sin.
Bathsheba experienced serious trauma. David assaulted her body, mind, and spirit. But he did not sin against her; his sin was against God. This is key for our understanding of forgiveness. You and I cannot forgive, at least not in a primary sense. God is the one sinned against so forgiveness belongs to him.
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