T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin 9780567451156, 9780567668028, 9780567453075

Table of contents :
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Half title
Forthcoming titles in this series include:
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber
Part I: Biblical Background
1 Pentateuch Jay Sklar
2 Prophets Mark J. Boda
3 Writings Christopher B. Ansberry
4 Synoptic Gospels C. Clifton Black
5 The Gospel and Epistles of John Gary M. Burge
6 Paul Timothy G. Gombis
7 Hebrews and the General Epistles David M. Moffitt
Part II: Historical Figures
8 Classic Rabbinic Perspectives Michael Graves
9 Irenaeus James R. Payton, Jr.
10 Athanasius Donald Fairbairn
11 Augustine Jesse Couenhoven
12 Thomas Aquinas Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
13 Martin Luther Robert Kolb
14 John Calvin Randall C. Zachman
15 Friedrich Schleiermacher Kevin M. Vander Schel
16 Søren Kierkegaard Sylvia Walsh
17 Karl Barth Paul T. Nimmo
Part III: Dogmatic Issues
18 Original Sin Ian A. McFarland
19 Divine Providence Thomas H. McCall
20 Freedom Alistair McFadyen
21 Reason Jason McMartin
22 Judgement and Wrath Jeremy J. Wynne
23 Finitude and Death Katherine Sonderegger
24 Principalities and Powers J. R. Daniel Kirk
25 Structural Sin Stephen Ray
26 The Sinner and the Victim George Hunsinger
27 Christ R. Michael Allen
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin

Forthcoming titles in this series include: T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement, edited by Adam J. Johnson T&T Clark Companion to Prayer, edited by Ashley Cocksworth & John C. McDowell Titles already published include: T&T Clark Companion to Methodism, edited by Charles Yrigoyen Jr T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology, edited by David M. Whitford T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology, edited by C. C. Pecknold and Tarno Toom T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, edited by Alcuin Reid

T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin Edited by Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Keith L. Johnson, David Lauber and Contributors, 2016 Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-56745-115-6 ePDF: 978-0-56745-307-5 ePub: 978-0-56714-964-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN

Contents Introduction Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber

ix

Part I: Biblical Background 1 Pentateuch Jay Sklar

3

2 Prophets Mark J. Boda

27

3 Writings Christopher B. Ansberry

45

4

Synoptic Gospels C. Clifton Black

61

5

The Gospel and Epistles of John Gary M. Burge

79

6 Paul Timothy G. Gombis 7

Hebrews and the General Epistles David M. Moffitt

97

111

Part II: Historical Figures 8

Classic Rabbinic Perspectives Michael Graves

129

9 Irenaeus James R. Payton, Jr.

149

10 Athanasius Donald Fairbairn

165

vi Contents

11 Augustine Jesse Couenhoven

181

12 Thomas Aquinas Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

199

13 Martin Luther Robert Kolb

217

14 John Calvin Randall C. Zachman

235

15 Friedrich Schleiermacher Kevin M. Vander Schel

251

16 Søren Kierkegaard Sylvia Walsh

267

17 Karl Barth Paul T. Nimmo

285

Part III: Dogmatic Issues 18 Original Sin Ian A. McFarland

303

19 Divine Providence Thomas H. McCall

319

20 Freedom Alistair McFadyen

337

21 Reason Jason McMartin

351

22 Judgement and Wrath Jeremy J. Wynne

369

23 Finitude and Death Katherine Sonderegger

385

24 Principalities and Powers J. R. Daniel Kirk

401

Contents

vii

25 Structural Sin Stephen Ray

417

26 The Sinner and the Victim George Hunsinger

433

27 Christ R. Michael Allen

451

Contributors Index

467 469

Introduction Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, So that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. Psalm 51.1-5

Though attributed to David and referring to his own personal sin, the opening lines of Psalm 51 have been used by Christians for centuries within corporate worship, as a guide for personal prayer and confession, and as the basis for theological claims. But what do these sentences mean and how do we make sense of them? For example, what does David mean when he talks about his ‘transgressions’ and ‘iniquity’? How should these words be defined? And what is their relationship to the words ‘sin’, ‘guilt’ and ‘evil’? Taken together, these words form a constellation of related yet distinct terms that give us a picture of a reality, and we will grasp the meaning and implications of this reality only if we see how these terms relate to one another within the context of this passage and others like it. Adding to the complexity, words like ‘transgressions’ seem to denote actions, while words like ‘guilt’ indicate a state of being. But how precisely does an act of transgression relate to a guilty state of being? Do our actions shape and

x Introduction

determine our being, or does our being produce our actions? Where does ‘sin’ come in? Is it an action or a state of being – or both? And the term ‘evil’ seems to be something altogether different, neither an action nor a state but something distinct from David even as he describes his participation in it. Setting these questions aside for a moment, the Psalm clearly depicts human transgressions and sin. Indeed, the Psalm traditionally is linked to David’s act of adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent arrangement of the death of Uriah. This raises questions. Why exactly does David pray to God about the human deeds he has performed? Why does it make sense to ask for divine mercy, cleansing and forgiveness for actions performed against other creatures? What does God have to do with David’s own free human actions? And how does David conclude that he has sinned against God – and God alone – in and through these actions performed against other people? On what basis does he draw this judgement? How can God be the object of a sinful action when this action is performed against a creature – a fellow human being? Finally, how are we to interpret the idea that David was ‘born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me’? How can someone be conceived into guilt and sin, such that he stands under divine judgement and needs mercy, cleansing and forgiveness from the moment of his birth? How does this divine cleansing and forgiveness from sin and guilt take place? Why are divine actions necessary rather than human acts of atonement and restitution? What does the fact that God performs these actions tell us about the being and character of God? How do these acts of forgiveness relate to God’s mercy and ‘steadfast love’? These questions, drawn from a surface reading of just a few verses from a single Psalm, require the resources of an entire theology in order to answer. And it is clear that, from the outset, this theology must have an intrinsic connection to the text from which these questions arise. Precise definitions of the biblical terms will be needed, and they must be derived with regard to their original language and setting as well as their location within the entire canon of Scripture. In addition, our interpretation of these verses must be be considered in relation to our reading of other passages in the canon so that our conclusions about this Psalm’s meaning and implications connect with the entire Bible’s depiction of human sin and its effects. Along with this historical and canonical reading, a coherent theological account of God and the nature of God’s relationship with human beings also will be required. A similar account will be needed for human beings. This account will need to depict the human condition at birth, the shape of human relationships, and the connection between human being and actions. We will

Introduction

xi

need to offer a definition of what being ‘born into sin’ means for our human capacities and their operation. Furthermore, we must understand the shape of human life under the conditions of sin in relation to God’s original intentions for humanity at creation and the effects of God’s mercy, cleansing and forgiveness. We will also need to describe the way that God brings about this cleansing of sin. For Christians, this description necessarily involves an account of the saving work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. To explain who Jesus Christ is and how his life, death and resurrection achieve salvation, we will need to pay attention to the people of Israel as well as the texts that shape their identity. We must offer an explanation of how this man Jesus of Nazareth relates to the eternal life of God, the nature of his experiences under the conditions of human sin, and how his life accomplishes God’s act of cleansing and forgiveness. Additionally, we will need to describe how the Holy Spirit relates to the person and work of Jesus Christ, how this same Spirit relates to believers, and how humans who live in and through the power of God’s Spirit are distinct from those who live by their own power. Even with these theological resources deployed, the task of interpreting this Psalm is not yet finished. Since the biblical canon is the canon of a church that stretches across many centuries and spans diverse cultures, our interpretation must be offered in conversation with the various ways this Psalm has been read and appropriated throughout the entire Christian tradition. The point of laying out these questions and the resources needed to answer them is to show that a proper interpretation of just one biblical passage about human sin – even one as prominent and widely cited as Psalm 51 – requires a fully developed doctrine of sin. If it is to be coherent, this doctrine of sin must emerge out of a close reading of the biblical text and must be developed in relation to other major doctrines, including the doctrines of God, anthropology, Christology, pneumatology and ecclesiology. This development must take place in light of the various doctrinal claims that have been made throughout the centuries as well as the unique questions and challenges of contemporary Christian life. Apart from this kind of careful development, our interpretation and deployment of Christian claims about sin and its effects will be impoverished. It is not that Christians will cease talking about sin. Texts like Psalm 51 will be read and interpreted, and terms like ‘sin’ and ‘guilt’ will be used in both corporate and personal settings. However, these things will happen on the basis of theological presuppositions and judgements that have been determined by factors other

xii Introduction

than a carefully formed doctrine of sin. Moreover, without such a carefully formed doctrine, we are also prone to slippage in theological language. For example, in light of our interpretative challenge, we might replacing the word ‘sin’ and its related words with other terms that seem less archaic and more relevant. Doing so, however, could lead us to the mistake of replacing the biblically and theologically rich terminology of sin, guilt, forgiveness and redemption with vague designations that carry contemporary significance. The result could be a reduction of the good news of the Gospel to personal strategies for developing our better selves. This neglect and distortion of theological language not only undermines the Christian account of sin, but the whole of Christian theology. Every Christian doctrine stands in an intrinsic relationship with every other, and the relationship between the doctrine of sin and other doctrines is a particularly close one. Our account of sin, for instance, directly affects how we describe the nature and capacities of human beings, the person of Christ and the importance of his atoning work on the cross, and the life and mission of the church within the world. A distorted doctrine of sin, therefore, will lead to disfigured theology. In contrast, a strongly articulated doctrine of sin takes its cue from the biblical description of sin and its effects, converses with influential interpreters throughout history, and asks clarifying questions in order to present the doctrine in a way that corresponds to the rest of the church’s dogmatic claims. This is where this book comes in. Its aim is to provide resources necessary to address the questions that arise in the attempt to articulate a biblically and theologically sound doctrine of sin. It proceeds in three parts. The first part contains chapters dedicated to the biblical text and the various ways in which Scripture – both Old Testament and New Testament – describes sin, its affects on humanity, and God’s dealing with human sin and sinfulness. This part highlights the distinct voices of the biblical writings in order to provide a thorough account of human sin. This includes definitions of sin, the depiction of human beings as sinners and their acts as sinful, and the way in which God deals with human sin with justice and mercy. The expansive examination of the biblical text focuses on the variety of terms and metaphors used to describe the depth of human sinfulness. Understood biblically, sin is sickness, amnesia and impurity. It also describes the distortion of human desires, and it always must be understood within the cultic and covenantal setting of the relationship between God and the people of Israel. Sin names disobedient and unrighteous moral actions, while also referring to human distrust and resistance to and rejection of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Scripture treats sin on multiple levels. Sin

Introduction

xiii

is deeply personal, as seen for example in David’s penitential plea in Psalm 51. It can name corporate or communal action, as when the prophets link Israel’s illicit worship practices with social injustice. And all of this is related to the biblical portrayal of the cosmic scope and power of sin. The second part of the book deals with influential treatments of the doctrine of sin in the history of the church, from the Patristic period to the Modern period. This section begins with an important and insightful account of classic rabbinic perspectives on sin. The prime benefit of examining Jewish accounts of sin is that it invites Christian theologians and biblical exegetes to engage with distinct, and in some cases contrary, interpretations of Scripture. Following this exploration of classic rabbinic perspectives, this section includes individual chapters devoted to close readings of influential and authoritative figures in the history of theology – from Irenaeus, Athanasius and Augustine to Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, to Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard and Barth. These varied theological accounts of sin enable us to see how the doctrine of sin intersects with other doctrines, including grace, faith, the saving person and work of Jesus Christ, knowledge of God and self-knowledge. They also enable us to account for the place of sin in the drama of the Bible that includes creation, fall, redemption and consummation. Furthermore, these chapters focus our attention on the specific way that God overcomes sin in the life of the Christian through the saving work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. This work of grace takes place as a movement from bondage to freedom, unbelief to faith, disobedience and rebellion to obedience and a life of holiness, self-preoccupation to life centred in God and attentive to others. The third part of the book provides creative theological reflections on doctrinal issues and concerns related to a fully formed doctrine of sin. The chapters in this section make use of biblical interpretation and engagement with historical figures to develop contemporary accounts of critical and complicated doctrinal issues. They invite further reflection in the task of articulating a doctrine of sin that is both biblically and theologically sound. Far from providing us with a final word, these chapters prompt us to take up a fresh reading and examination of the biblical text in conversation with seminal figures in Christian history. This section, and the book as a whole, concludes with a chapter on Christ. This reminds us that although it is necessary for Christian theology and the Christian life to have a lucid and robust doctrine of sin, the reality of sin is not the ultimate word about humanity and the world. The main theme of Scripture and the central theme of Christian doctrine is the Gospel – the good news of God’s victory over sin and death. As David says in Psalm 103:

xiv Introduction He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is his mercy great upon those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us. (Ps. 103.10-12)

Part I

Biblical Background

1

Pentateuch Jay Sklar

Sadly, sin is central to the Bible’s story. If the goal of a story is to solve a problem, then ‘sin constitutes the problem that God resolves: the conflict carries us from the third chapter of Genesis to the closing chapter of Revelation’.1 With few exceptions, sin mars and defaces every chapter of the Bible after Genesis 2 and before Revelation 21. The goal of this essay is to consider what the first five books of the Bible – known as the Pentateuch or Torah or the Law – have to say about sin and how the Lord responds to it. The essay’s structure is straightforward. In the first part, I will consider various terms and metaphors used to describe sin and the Lord’s response to it. In the second, I will turn to consider various chapters and sections of the Pentateuch that contribute most to our understanding of what sin is and does, and how the Lord responds to it. In the conclusion, I will draw together five of the major themes that stand out from the following survey.

Vocabulary and metaphors for sin According to one study, the Old Testament has over fifty different words or phrases to describe sin, wrongdoing and guilt.2 On the one hand, such a rich vocabulary ‘testif[ies] to the fact that sin was a dominant concern of the Israelite theologians. Indeed, their highlighting of human failure, deficiency or offence in the cultic, ethical and moral spheres constitutes a central theme of 1

2

D. A. Carson, ‘Sin’s Contemporary Significance’, in Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (eds), Fallen: A Theology of Sin (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), p. 22. James Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains: Hebrew (Old Testament) (Electronic edn; Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, 1997), §§88.289–88.318; in Mark J. Boda, A Severe Mercy: Sin and Its Remedy in the Old Testament (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), p. 6, n. 16.

T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin

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OT theology.’3 At the same time, this rich vocabulary also testifies to the deep prevalence of sin in the world. ‘Humans have discovered an astonishing number of ways to manifest their estrangement from their creator.’4 If we narrow our focus to the Pentateuch, the most widely occurring terms (and their most common English translations) are the words ʿāwōn (iniquity/ guilt) and pešaʿ (transgression), and several words built on the root ḥṭʾ (to sin).5 While it is generally agreed that these are not strict synonyms, it is not especially easy to identify the exact nuances of difference. This task is made all the more difficult by the fact that the terms overlap greatly and can even be used interchangeably in some contexts.6 A more attainable goal is to make general observations on how they are used in these books. Five observations in particular may be noted: 1. All three can occur in contexts that describe wrongs committed against God or against others.7 Sins against God ʿāwōn (iniquity) pešaʿ (transgression) Words built on ḥṭʾ (sin)

Sins against others

Exod. 20.5; 34.9; Lev 7.18; Gen. 44.16 Num. 14.19 Exod. 23.21 Gen. 31.36; 50.17 Gen. 20.6; 39.9; Exod. 10.16; Gen. 20.9; 31.36; 40.1; 23.33; Lev. 5.15 42.22

2. Terms built on the root ḥṭʾ occur most commonly. In the Pentateuch, sixty-five verses contain terms built on this root,8 compared to thirty-six verses for ʿāwōn and eight for pešaʿ. 3

4

5

6

7

8

Robin C. Cover, ‘Sin, Sinners (OT)’, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), Anchor Bible Dictionary 6 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 31. Douglas J. Moo, ‘Sin in Paul’, in Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (eds), Fallen: A Theology of Sin (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), p. 111. Other relevant terms include: 1) those built on the root šgg/šgh, referring to unintentional sins in particular (Lev. 4.2, 13; Num. 15.22; etc.); 2) the verbs ʾāšam/ʾāšēm (Lev. 4.13, 22; etc.), typically translated with ‘to be guilty’, but more accurately translated with ‘to bear guilt’s consequences’ (or in some instances ‘to be held liable for guilt’) (see Jay Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005), pp. 24–41; 3) the verb māʿal and the noun maʿal, which describe acts of treachery, whether against a human partner (Num. 5.12, 27) or the Lord (Lev. 5.15; 26.40) (see discussion in Jay Sklar, Leviticus: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014], p. 120). For example, the phrase ‘to bear/forgive sin’ can use any of the three terms for ‘sin’ with no apparent difference in meaning; cf. Exod. 34.7 [ʿāwōn]; Exod. 32.32 [ḥaṭṭāʾt]; Exod. 23.21 [pešaʿ]; see Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement, p. 20, n. 38; p. 89, n. 28. The table does not attempt to be exhaustive, especially with regard to words built on ḥṭʾ. It is true, however, that there are far fewer examples for the terms ʿāwōn and pešaʿ, for which see next point above. I have removed verses that do not use any of the relevant terms to refer to a wrong, for example,

Pentateuch

5

3. In contexts of unintentional sin, we find ʿāwōn (Lev. 5.17) and terms built on the root ḥṭʾ (Lev. 4.2; 5.15). We do not find pešaʿ in these contexts, perhaps suggesting it has a stronger connotation of intentional rebellion.9 4. ʿāwōn tends to be used when reference is not simply to the sin but also to the penalty that results from it, as in Cain’s cry, ‘My sin/punishment (ʿāwōn) is more than I can bear!’ (Gen. 4.13).10 This use is especially common in Exodus to Numbers in the phrase ‘he will bear his sin’, that is, he will bear the penalty for it.11 From a literary perspective, this is known as metonymy, the use of one noun (here, ‘sin’) to refer to another noun with which it is closely related (here, ‘punishment’). Biblically speaking, sin and penalty go hand in hand. 5. In two passages, ʿāwōn, pešaʿ, and words built on the root ḥṭʾ are used together to describe sin in its totality – and the fact that God deals with it in its totality. On the Day of Atonement, Aaron is ‘to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness (ʿāwōn) and rebellion (pešaʿ) of the Israelites – all their sins (ḥaṭṭāʾt) – and put them on the goat’s head’ so that it may bear them all away, never to be seen again (Lev. 16.21). And in Exodus 34.7, coming shortly after the people’s rebellion with the golden calf (Exod. 32), the Lord declares that he ‘forgives iniquity (ʿāwōn), transgression (pešaʿ) and sin (ḥaṭṭāʾâ)’ (Exod. 34.7), that is, sin in all its forms. In both passages, the emphasis is clear: ‘God’s forgiveness is as multifaceted as the sins there are to forgive.’12 The picture becomes both richer and more concrete when we go beyond individual terms for sin and include different metaphors used to describe it.

9

10 11

12

verses where ḥaṭṭāʾt refers only to the ‘sin offering’, or where verbs built on this root refer to ‘bearing the loss’ (Gen. 31.39) or to ‘purifying’ (Lev. 8.15; 14.49; etc.). In the Pentateuch, the term describes ‘situations where an inferior commits serious sin against a superior (Gen. 31.36; 50.17), including one case where the superior is the angel of the Lord himself (Exod. 23.21)’ (Jay Sklar, Leviticus, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament [Daniel L. Block (ed.); Grand Rapids: Zondervan, forthcoming], at Lev. 16.16). In a footnote to this comment, I observe: ‘Outside the Pentateuch, see also the use of the verb built on the same root (pāšaʿ) to describe rebellion against human kings (2 Kgs 1.1; 3.5) as well as against the Lord himself (1 Kgs 8.50).’ See also Gen. 19.15; Exod. 20.5; 34.7; Lev. 18.25; Num. 14.18; Deut. 5.9. Exod. 28.43; Lev. 5.1, 17; 7.18; 17.16; 19.8; 20.17, 19; 22.16; Num. 5.31; 14.34; 18.1 (2x), 23; 30.16 (15). See full discussion in Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement, pp. 20–23. This same phrase can occur with ḥēṭʾ; see Lev. 19.17; 20.20; 22.9; 24.15; Num. 9.13; 18.22, 32. There is no apparent difference between this term and ʿāwōn in these contexts; cf. ‘they will bear penalty for their sin (ʿāwōn)’ in Lev 20.19 with ‘they will bear penalty for their sin (ḥēṭʾ)’ in Lev. 20.20 (see further Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement, p. 20, n. 38). This shows again that different terms for sin can overlap in meaning. Jay Sklar, ‘Sin’, in vol. 2 of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology (Samuel E. Balentine (ed.); Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin

These metaphors work in different ways. Some of them focus on what sin is with respect to our relationship to God. If he is our king, then sin is an act of rebellion against him (Num. 14.9; Deut. 1.26); if he is our faithful spouse, then sin is an act of spiritual prostitution (Exod. 34.17; Lev. 17.7; 20.5; Deut. 31.16). Idolatry especially is considered to be a highly relational sin and is therefore described with highly relational language: it is a ‘serving’ of other gods (Exod. 23.24, 33; Deut. 7.4; 13.6), instead of faithfully serving the Lord as a son does the father he loves (Exod. 4.23); it is a ‘forsaking’ of the Lord for other gods (Deut. 31.16), instead of ‘cleaving’ to the Lord in faithful love as one might do with a spouse (Deut. 10.20; 13.4 [13.5]; 30.20 cf. Gen. 2.24). While sin is sometimes thought of today as the breaking of a rule, these metaphors emphasize that it is the breaking of a relationship, an act of treachery against the Lord, the faithful covenant king and father and husband. Other metaphors describe what sin is in terms of its effects on the sinner or others. Sometimes it is described as a defiling substance that clings to the home of the Lord against whom the sin was committed (Lev. 16.19), or to the land on which the sin was committed (Lev. 18.24-27), or to the sinner who committed it (Lev. 16.30; 18.30). It is an image that most find easy to identify with: sin often leaves us feeling dirty (cf. Ps. 51.4 [2]). In one instance, sin is pictured as a lethal burden that weighs down on the sinner’s head and must be removed by another if the sinner is to survive (Lev. 16.20-22).13 In yet another, it is pictured as a wild animal, lying in wait and ready to attack and destroy (Gen. 4.13).14 In all of these, sin is viewed as utterly destructive; its purpose is never to bless but always to curse. Finally, some metaphors focus on how God delivers sinners from its effects. If sin is viewed as a defiling impurity, the Lord is the one who provides a way for it to be cleansed (Lev. 16.30). If sin is viewed as a death sentence, the Lord is the one who provides a way to be ransomed from it (Lev. 17.11).15 In both cases, it is the Lord who must ultimately rescue sinners from their sin. As helpful as a study of specific terms or metaphors can be for understanding sin, it is far from sufficient to consider these alone for the simple reason that scores of texts describe instances of sin without using specific terms 13 14 15

Cf. Isa. 53.4-8. See discussion below under ‘Genesis 3’. This is a central verse for understanding sacrificial atonement. For in-depth discussion, see Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement, pp. 164–74. The discussion could be summarized as follows: ‘In short, the animal’s lifeblood was accepted as the ransom payment in place of the offeror’s: it served as a mitigated penalty on the offeror’s behalf, graciously accepted by the Lord (the offended party), in this way rescuing the offeror (the offending party) from due punishment and restoring peace to the relationship between the sinner and the Lord’ (Sklar, Leviticus, TOTC, p. 221).

Pentateuch

7

or metaphors to describe it – including the Bible’s foundational chapter on sin (Gen. 3)! The following overview therefore focuses on texts where the concept of sin is addressed, whether or not specific terms or metaphors for sin are named. The goal is not to examine every instance of sin in the Pentateuch but to examine those texts or sections which contribute most to our understanding of it.

Genesis 3 Sin’s characteristics – As this chapter is foundational to the biblical understanding of sin, it is especially important to pay attention to how sin is described.16 If we begin with a focus on the actions of Adam and Eve, we see three related characteristics of sin. The first is to doubt God’s goodness. When the serpent says, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (3.4b-5), he is in effect saying, ‘God is holding back from you something good; he does not have your interests at all in mind.’17 The context points in the other direction. In light of all the blessings poured out on Adam and Eve in Genesis 1 and 2, it could not have been clearer that God loved them and desired their good. But once the seed of doubt takes root, it is powerful. After all, if God is not good, why obey him? The second characteristic is closely related: ‘the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was

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17

It may be briefly noted how differently this passage is approached by others, for example, James Barr claims that we do not have a primeval disobedience described in this passage: ‘It is not without importance that the term “sin” is not used anywhere in the story … nor do we find any of the terms usually understood as “evil”, “rebellion”, “transgression” or “guilt”’ (C. John Collins, Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2006), p. 155; see James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 6. Collins goes on to explain the problem with this type of argument: ‘This is an astonishing claim, because Barr – the scholar who has done so much to introduce exegetes to sound lexical semantics – should of course know that the existence of the referent or concept is not limited to the presence of certain vocabulary. Indeed, God’s question in Genesis 3:11, “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (compare v. 17), could hardly be improved upon as a description of “disobedience”’ (Collins, Genesis 1–4, p. 155). Note as well that the serpent does not use the name ‘the Lord-God’ (‘Yahweh-God’), as is common in 2.4–3.24 (nineteen occurrences), but simply ‘God’ (only three occurrences, two from the serpent and one from Eve in responding to him; 3.1, 3, 5). Collins notes: ‘Now, as many have observed, the name God designates the deity in his role of cosmic Creator and Ruler (its use in 1.1–2.3), while ‘the Lord’ (‘Yahweh’) is particularly his name as he enters into covenantal relationship with human beings. By dropping the covenant name, then, the serpent is probably advancing his programme of temptation by diverting the woman’s attention from the relationship the Lord had established’ (Collins, Genesis 1–4, p. 171; see also Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15 [Word Biblical Commentary 1; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987], p. 88).

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to be desired to make one wise’ (3.6). In other words, people do not sin simply because they doubt God’s character, but because sin is in some way attractive, alluring. In this context in particular, sin’s allure may be especially related to a misplaced desire for moral autonomy, the ability to determine right and wrong for oneself without reference to God. A significant number of commentators understand the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ to represent wisdom (note that it was ‘desirable to give one insight’, v. 6).18 In the biblical story, however, true wisdom always begins with ‘the fear of the Lord’ (Prov. 1.7); in other words, wisdom happens within and under divine law.19 To break divine law in order to get wisdom is to proclaim autonomy from the Lord, the ability to determine right and wrong – ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – for oneself.20 Cassuto summarizes: ‘[Adam] was not content with what was given to him, and desired to obtain more. He did not wish to remain in the position of a child who is under the supervision of his father and is constantly dependent on him; he wanted to learn by himself of the world around him; he aspired to become in knowledge, too, like God.’21 Distrust of God and misplaced desire lead directly to the third characteristic of sin: disobedience to God’s command. The Lord’s question in 3.11 – ‘Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ – is paradigmatic when it comes to sin: ‘Have you done ____ which I commanded you not to do?’ Throughout the Bible, sin is sin because it is disobedience to the Lord, an outright act of treason against humanity’s Creator and King.22 Sin’s consequences – As a result of this act, the contrast between Genesis 1–2 and Genesis 3 is as stark as that between day and night. In Genesis 1–2, all is good – even ‘very good’ (1.31) – and humanity lives in a lush garden (2.8-9), under God’s blessing (1.22, 28), enjoying perfect peace with him, one another, and the world. All is glory and light. In Genesis 3, humanity rebels against their Creator, is banished from the garden, and now lives under God’s cursing, estranged from

18 19

20

21

22

See references in Wenham, Genesis 1–15, pp. 63–4. For further rationale, see n. 20. See Ps. 111.10; Prov. 2.1-6; 3.5-6; 9.10; 11.7, 29; 15.33; Isa. 11.2 (Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26 (The New American Commentary 1A; Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), p. 24, n. 74. ‘This interpretation [of the tree] appears to be confirmed by Ezek. 28, the closest parallel to Gen. 2–3, which in highly mythological language describes how the king of Tyre was expelled from Eden for overweening pride and claiming himself to be “wise as a god” (28.6, 15–17)’ (Wenham, Genesis 1–15, p. 64). See also Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, p. 206. Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (2 vols; Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1961–4), p. 113, cited in Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, p. 205, n. 75. Num. 14.9; Deut. 31.16; Isa. 1.4; Ezek. 2.3; Hos. 4.11-12; Rom. 1.18-25; etc.

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him (3.8-10), one another (3.7, 12, 16), and the world (3.17-18).23 All is shame and darkness. Clearly, sin is an acid that mars and distorts all that it touches. Indeed, these chapters emphasize its destructive nature through a series of tragic reversals that demonstrate how it undoes the very blessings for which humanity has been created.24 Genesis 1–2

Genesis 3

Living in a fruitful garden (2.15) Naked and no shame (2.25) Multiplying (1.28) Keeping a fruitful garden (2.15)

Cast out of the garden (3.23-24) Naked and ashamed (3.7) Pain in childbirth (3.16) Working the thorn-infested ground (3.17-19) Dying and returning to the ground (3.19)

Taken out of the ground and given life (2.7)

Sadly, these tragic consequences were not limited to Adam and Eve; their descendants are born into this broken and fallen world – and further its brokenness. The following chapters in Genesis spell this out in graphic detail25 and our own experience of life to this day confirms it: we live in a world marred by sin – and we ourselves mar it further. What must be remembered is that according to the biblical account, this was not how God made his world or those who were to bear his image. The world and those within it began free from sin; its entry into the story is as an intruder, an uninvited guest, a foreign and lethal virus that seeks to destroy and undo God’s good world and that now infects all those born into it.26 The title of Cornelius Plantinga’s book on sin gets it right: Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be.27 If our telling of the biblical story ever takes away the idea of sin as foreign intruder – to the world and to human nature – we have lost the biblical story.28 The other participants in the story – In looking at Genesis 3, it is important to note that Adam and Eve are not the only participants in this story. Though they bear full responsibility for their actions (vv. 16–19), they have been led to this point 23

24 25 26 27

28

Note Wenham’s observations on the man blaming the woman and God in 3.12: ‘Here the divisive effects of sin, setting man against his dearest companion (cf. 2.23) and alienating him from his all-caring creator, are splendidly portrayed’ (Genesis 1–15, p. 77). When the woman blames the snake in 3.13, Wenham notes: ‘Already the peace that characterized man’s original relationship with the animals is shattered. Sin has put alienation between God and man, between men and women, and between animals and men’ (Genesis 1–15, p. 78). The chart is from Sklar, ‘Sin’, forthcoming. See below, ‘Genesis 4–11’. See below, ‘Genesis 4–11: Sin is something inside us from our youth’. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). See below, ‘Genesis 4–11: Sin is something inside us from our youth’, and esp. n. 34.

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by the serpent, who questions the Lord’s character and denies the Lord’s words (vv. 4-5). Its entrance into the story is mysterious, and the text does not explain who or what is at work behind it. Collins is probably correct to conclude, however, that ‘a competent reader from the original audience would have been able to infer that the serpent is the mouthpiece of a Dark Power’, as evidenced by the fact that it speaks (Israelites knew as well as we do that snakes do not talk) and that its goal is to undermine God’s good intentions.29 Later texts will make this inference explicit and identify the snake as nothing other than the mouthpiece of the evil one.30 But the Lord also acts in this passage and his words and deeds make clear that sin does not have the last word. Indeed, two themes are introduced here that will be seen again and again when it comes to sin. First, though the Lord does bring justice to bear against sin (3.16-19), he also responds to sinners with mercy. Here, he clothes Adam and Eve and allows them to live and to be fruitful and to multiply. His mercy in light of humanity’s sin is something the biblical writers celebrate – and cling to – time and again.31 Second, the Lord himself will fight against sin and ultimately destroy it. In 3.15 he promises that this dark power, and those aligned with it, will be defeated. Significantly, this is something the Lord arranges: ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’ The final stroke will come through the woman’s offspring – just how we are not yet told32 – but all as part of the Lord’s design. He promises to defeat evil fully and finally. Summary – Genesis 3 has outlined an understanding of sin that will be filled in as the biblical story progresses. In its basic contours, sin is disobedience to God, destructive in its results (in our relationship with the Lord, one another, and the world), associated with an evil power who desires humanity’s harm, and calls forth both God’s justice in punishing it and his mercy in forgiving it – with the promise that he will see to its ultimate defeat.

Genesis 4–11 Now that sin has entered the world (Gen. 3), it does not recede into the background; instead, it becomes one of the central elements in the stories of 29 30 31 32

Collins, Genesis 1–4, p. 172. Rev. 12.9; 20.2; see also Jn 8.44. Deut. 4.31; 2 Chron. 30.9; Ps. 86.5; 103.8-14; 130.3-4; Joel 2.13. For helpful discussion, see Collins, Genesis 1–4, pp. 155–9.

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Genesis 4–11, especially those of Cain (4.1-15), Lamech (4.19-24), Noah (6–9), and Babel (11.1-9). Taken together, these stories describe a wide number of sin’s characteristics and consequences, six of which receive special emphasis. Sin is something outside of us that we must fight – In Genesis 4, in response to Cain’s jealousy of his brother Abel, the Lord warns him, ‘If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it’ (Gen. 4.7). Sin is pictured here as a wild animal, like a lion, crouching in wait of its prey (cf. Gen. 49.9). The Lord exhorts him to fight against it (‘you must rule over it’), indeed, to avoid it altogether by choosing to do ‘what is right’.33 He also warns Cain that once he begins to go down sin’s path (‘if you do not what is right’), he opens himself fully to its attack. Cain ignores the warning, allows his jealousy to fester, and the lion pounces on his heart: he kills Abel in the very next verse (4.8). Sin is a master that we empower by obeying and it will not be satisfied until we are completely enslaved (‘it desires to have you’). Sin is something inside of us from our youth – Just before the Lord announces the flood, we read his evaluation of the human condition: ‘The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time’ (Gen. 6.5). There is a clear link between the second half of the verse and the first: evil hearts produce evil deeds, just as poisoned springs produce poisoned water. And lest we think this was simply a defect of the pre-flood generation, or something that only happens later in life, the Lord gives the same evaluation of humanity after the flood, and explains this problem is there from our earliest days: ‘every inclination of the human heart is evil from youth’ (Gen. 8.21).34 Adam and Eve’s 33 34

Cf. Isa. 1.17; Amos 5.14 (Mathews, Genesis, 1–11:26, p. 270). The phrase ‘from (min) youth/childhood (naʿar)’ can be used to describe the beginning of a person’s existence, as in the phrase ‘from youth/childhood unto old age’ (Josh. 6.21), that is, from the beginning of life to its end. This understanding of ‘from youth’ well fits the context here. Mathews explains the implications of this for 8:21, setting the verse in its immediate context of Genesis: ‘It was in Eden that mankind initiated its pilgrimage with sin, and since that time each person has been born already on that journey’ (Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, p. 396). Hamilton takes a similar approach in his comments on 6.5, expanding in particular on how Gen. 3 relates: ‘The reader goes from “very good” in Gen. 1.31 to “only evil continually” in 6:5, and in between is Adam’s sin in 3:1-7. Should not the reader conclude that the sin of Genesis 3 has resulted in the change from “very good” to “only evil continually”?’ (James Hamilton, ‘Original Sin in Biblical Theology’, in Hans Madueme and Michael Reeves (eds), Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin: Theological, Biblical, and Scientific Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), p. 193. Thus one does not need to wait until Paul to find a doctrine of the fall or original sin; the early chapters of Genesis already provide evidence for them. For a philosophical-theological discussion of ‘original sin’, see Ian A. McFarland’s article in this volume (‘Original Sin’). For a full-length treatment of both the fall and original sin, see Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin. For interaction with reading strategies that deny the fall and/or original sin, see C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?: Who They Were and Why You Should Care (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), pp. 44–9; Hamilton, ‘Original Sin in Biblical Theology’, pp. 191–9.

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descendants do not need to be taught how to do wrong; it comes quite naturally from within. Sin grieves God – Immediately after the description of humanity’s wickedness in 6.5, we read of the Lord’s response to it: ‘The Lord was grieved35 that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled’ (6.6). He has made humanity in his image to reflect his character into the world in order that it might become a place of Eden-like beauty and peace. When humanity rebels against that purpose – destroying one another and poisoning his world – he is so saddened that he wishes he had never made them (6.7). Nor does he care whether such frank speech makes us uncomfortable or fits with our theology of his nature; he wants us to see how much sin grieves the very core of who he is. Sin is rebellion against God – In Genesis 1, humanity is made in God’s image and told to fill the earth in order that they might reflect his goodness, justice, mercy and love to its every corner (1.26-28; cf. 9.1). This would be to his glory and humanity’s blessing. In Genesis 11.4, the builders of the tower of Babel refuse the mandate to fill the earth and undertake instead a project to their own glory (‘let us make a name for ourselves’), not the Lord’s.36 Sin ultimately seeks to replace the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man. Sin damages others – Sin’s entry into the world in Genesis 3 is immediately followed by the stories of two murderers in Genesis 4: Cain (4.8) and Lamech (4.23). What is more, the harm these men inflict is in no way justified by the actions of their victims. Lamech murders because someone has injured him only slightly; Cain does so because of no direct offence at all. Sin does not express itself in terms of justice towards others but in terms of disproportionate vengeance on them. Sin results in negative consequences for the sinner – The results of sin are never good: Cain is cursed from the ground (4.11); the builders of Babel are divided and scattered (11.8-9); every living creature on the earth is wiped away

35

36

The verb can describe relenting of an earlier decision (Exod. 32.12, 14) but also grief or regret (Judg. 2.18; 21.6, 15; 1 Sam. 15.11). In this context, it is clearly the latter in view, as shown especially by the focus on the Lord’s emotional pain in the last part of the verse. Mathews explains: ‘God’s response of grief over the making of humanity either side of ellipses…is not remorse in the sense of sorrow over a mistaken creation; our verse shows that God’s pain has its source in the perversion of human sin. The making of “man” is no error; it is what “man” has made of himself ’ (Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, p. 343). Cf. the same with the Lord’s grief over Saul in 1 Sam. 15.11. ‘[I]n the present context, the stated purpose of the builders, “that we be not scattered all over the world,” constitutes a direct challenge to the intent of God as expressed in the blessing to postdiluvial humanity: “Fill the earth.” Man did not perceive this to be a blessing and so devised means to thwart its fulfillment.’ Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (The JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), p. 83.

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(7.21-23). The cosmic irony of sin is that it is tempting because it looks delicious but in the end it is bitter poison. The Lord responds to sin with both justice and mercy – Along with these characteristics and consequences of sin, however, these chapters also make clear, once again, that the Lord does not abandon his sinful creation; along with his justice he shows his mercy. The Lord curses Cain (4.11) yet also protects him from the vengeance of others (4.15).37 The Lord cleanses the earth (7.21-24) but remembers Noah (8.1), and blesses him (9.1), and rebuilds humanity through him, giving to him the creation privileges of being fruitful and ruling (9.1-2 [cf. 1.26-28]) and assuring him that humanity still bears God’s image (9.6 [cf. 1.26-27]). The Lord divides and disperses the builders of Babel (11.8-9) but raises a godly line (11.20-32), leading to his servant Abraham, through whom he will bless all the families of the earth (12.3). ‘No matter how sinful humanity becomes, God’s ultimate plan for humanity in Eden is not thwarted because God responds in grace to humanity’s sin.’38

Genesis 12 to Numbers As the previous section indicated, the Lord’s call of Abraham is another merciful response to humanity’s sin. Indeed, while the builders of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves (11.4), it is the Lord who will make Abraham’s name great (12:2), and will do so in order to bring blessing to all the families of the earth (12.3). Significantly, this was in direct keeping with the Lord’s purposes in creation: The promises to Abraham renew the vision for humanity set out in Genesis 1 and 2. He, like Noah before him, is a second Adam figure. Adam was given the garden of Eden; Abraham is promised Canaan. God told Adam to be fruitful and multiply; Abraham is promised descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven. God walked with Adam in Eden; Abraham was told to walk before God. In this way the advent of Abraham is seen as the answer to the problems set out in Genesis 1–11: through him all the families of the earth will be blessed.39 37

38

39

In comments on 4.13-14, Collins notes, ‘Cain complains at the sentence [the Lord has just given him in 4.11-12], a just sentence tempered with mercy, and God would have been fully right to destroy Cain or at least to dismiss the complaint – but instead he offers protection! This is a big God; man’s spurning of his mercy and sniveling complaints cannot deter God from his pursuit of his fallen human creatures’ (Genesis 1–4, p. 213). Sklar, ‘Sin’, forthcoming; see further David J. A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch (JSOTSup 10; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1978), pp. 76–9. Gordon J. Wenham, Story as Torah: Reading the Old Testament Ethically (Old Testament Studies; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), p. 37.

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This in turn means that as the story progresses, those descended from Abraham – the Israelites – have the same purpose. They are to be the Lord’s agents of blessing, those who walk with God and are blameless, and those who help others to do the same. In keeping with this, the Lord calls them to be a ‘kingdom of priests’ (Exod. 19.5). Williams explains: As a kingdom of priests, Israel is called to represent the nations before God, to mediate God’s redemptive purpose in the world. A priest stands between God and the people, representing each to the other … Yahweh here summons Israel as an entire nation to act as a priest, a covenantal mediator between him and the rest of the world. In this priestly service, he expects Israel to pray for, love, minister to, and witness to the nations.40

It is therefore no surprise that after this priestly call in Exodus 19, the text begins to focus again on sin. After all, a priestly nation has to understand well what it is and how to deal with it. But there are additional reasons why sin again becomes a focus in Exod. 20–Num. 1) the Lord is now coming to dwell in the Israelites’ midst (Exod. 40), and this made it especially important for them to deal with their sin properly; 2) because this section of text introduces the tabernacle and the atoning sacrifices which take place there (Exod. 25–31, 35–40; Lev. 1–7), it naturally discusses the types of sins those sacrifice address; and 3) sadly, the Israelites commit many sins during this time. In the following summary, I will describe three general categories of sin identified in this section and how the sin in each category is to be properly addressed.41 This will be followed by a brief discussion of Exodus 34.6-7 and Leviticus 26, both of which shed further light on how the Lord interacts with his sinful people. Unintentional sin – In the first category, sin is described as ‘unintentional/ inadvertent’ (Lev. 4.2; 5.14; Num. 15.22; etc.).42 This type of sin might occur when ‘sinners are aware of a law but somehow not aware they are breaking it, as is the case with the person who unintentionally kills another (Num. 35)’,43 or 40

41

42

43

Michael D. Williams, Far as the Curse Is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2005), p. 138. This will be a summary of the fuller discussion found in Jay Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement: Lessons from the Pentateuch’, BBR 22.4 (2012), pp. 467–91. Most commonly, the Hebrew words used to describe these sins are ‘the noun šĕgāgâ (Lev. 4.2, 22, 27; 5.15, 18; 22.14; Num. 15.24, 25 [2x], 26, 27, 28, 29; 35.11, 15), the verb šāgag (Lev. 5.18; Num 15:28) and the verb šāgâ (Lev. 4.13; Num. 15.22)’ (Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 469). The examples cited further above demonstrate the unintentional nature of these sins, as do examples in which an unintentional sin has to be ‘made known’ to the person who has committed it (Lev. 4.22-23, 27-28), which naturally implies the sinner did not even know a wrong had been done. Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, pp. 469–70.

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with the person who quickly makes a vow, forgets about it, and thus fails to keep it (Lev. 54).44 While the sin may have been unintentional, there are still consequences. This should be no surprise. To this day we realize that people may unintentionally break a law and yet still be held responsible, as happens when people receive a ticket even if their speeding was unintentional – an example with which many can unfortunately identify! For the Israelites, properly addressing the sin required both confession (which presumes repentance) (Lev. 5.5) and sacrifice. By these means, the sin was atoned and the sinner forgiven (4.20, 26; 5.10; Num 15.25; etc.). It is important to note at this point that the provision of sacrificial atonement to the Israelites to address their sin was rooted in the Lord’s grace towards them. This is especially clear in Leviticus 17.11, the key text describing sacrificial atonement, in which the Lord explains: ‘… for the life of the body is the blood, and I, I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your lives, for it is the blood, by means of the life, [that] makes atonement’. The repetition of ‘I’45 is usually not brought across in English because it sounds too redundant, but it is the very repetition of the word that drives home the key point: sacrificial atonement works because the Lord himself has granted that it may and has given it to the Israelites as a gracious gift. Schwartz explains: What our clause does, in its unique, metaphorically graphic way, is to take a set phrase, the ‘placing’ of the blood on the altar, and to reverse the conceptual direction of the action: ‘It is not you who are placing the blood on the altar for me, for my benefit, but rather the opposite: it is I who have placed it there for you – for your benefit.’46

And this meant that atoning sacrifices not only restored the sinner’s relationship to the Lord, they served as clear demonstrations of the Lord’s grace to his sinful people. High-handed (apostate) sin – The second category of sin is at the opposite end of the spectrum and is for those sins that are committed ‘with a high hand (bĕyād rāmâ)’ (Num. 15.30). Far from being unintentional, these sins are defiant acts of apostasy. This is suggested by the fact that such sinners are further described as ‘blaspheming the Lord’ and ‘despising the word of the Lord’ (Num. 44 45 46

For the latter, see discussion in Sklar, Leviticus, TOTC, p. 116. In Hebrew: waʾănī nĕtattīw. Baruch J. Schwartz, ‘The Prohibitions Concerning the “Eating” of Blood in Leviticus 17’, in Gary A. Anderson and Saul M. Olyan (eds), Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), p. 51.

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15.30-31),47 and by the fact that the phrase ‘with a high hand’ can be used in the civil sphere to describe rebellious treason against a king (1 Kgs 11.26-27a).48 This section of the Pentateuch provides many instances of this type of sin. From a corporate perspective, we need look no further than the chapter leading into Numbers 15, where the Israelites not only refuse to enter the Promised Land according to the Lord’s command, but also insist that a life of slavery is better than relationship with him (Num. 14.1-3). The Lord makes the apostate nature of their sin clear when he asks, ‘How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?’ (Num. 14.11). It is particularly significant to note that the Lord uses the phrase ‘despise me’ in Deuteronomy 31.20 to describe those who ‘turn to other gods’ and ‘break the covenant’. It is clearly apostasy that is in view. From an individual perspective, we need look no further than the end of Numbers 15, where the warning against high-handed sin (vv. 30–31) is immediately followed by a story of a person who commits it: the man gathering wood on the Sabbath (vv. 32–36).49 While this may seem a trifling offence to many today, it was clear to the Israelites that the Sabbath had been set apart as a holy day, on which no work was to be done, as a sign of nothing less than Israel’s covenant relationship with the Lord (Exod. 31.13-17). To disregard the Sabbath was not only to break the covenant but also to profane that which the Lord set apart as holy; it was a clear act of apostasy in which this man willingly engaged. Other examples of apostate sin – both corporate and individual – may be multiplied.50 Importantly, while the Lord provides sacrifice as a more or less automatic means of atonement for unintentional sinners (assuming, of course, there is repentance and proper sacrificial procedure is followed), he does not do so for apostate ones (cf. Num. 15.22-28 with 15.30-31).51 Indeed, for those who commit treason against the King of heaven, there exists no automatic provision of atonement. On the one hand, this demonstrates that sacrificial atonement is not an ‘inalienable right’.52 When the Lord does provide it to the Israelites – as 47

48 49 50

51 52

Not only does the language of these phrases communicate a complete rejection of the Lord, their use in other contexts makes clear that apostasy is in view. For ‘blaspheme (giddēp)’, see especially Ezek. 20.27 (cf. v. 28); 2 Kgs 19.22. For ‘despise (bāzâ)’, see especially 1 Sam. 2.30; 2 Chron. 36.15–16. See further discussion in Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, pp. 471–6. See references in Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 477, n. 26. Corporate: Exod. 32.1-10; Num. 11.1-3; 16.41-50 (17.6–15); 21.4-9; 25.1-5; individual: Lev. 24.10-16 (see discussion in Sklar, Leviticus, TOTC, esp. comments on vv. 13–14 [pp. 291–2]). For the exceptional nature of the Day of Atonement, see Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 476, n. 23. Noted by Roy Gane, Cult and Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), p. 204.

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he does in the case of unintentional sin – he does so as an act of grace. At the same time, the lack of automatic atonement for apostate sins emphasizes their severity. It is true that atonement was still possible in these instances, but it was not automatic and could come at an incredibly high cost indeed (see below, ‘Atonement for high-handed sin’). Intentional but not (necessarily) high-handed sin – In between these two categories are sins that are intentional but not (necessarily) considered to be acts of apostate rebellion. The clearest examples are found in Lev. 5.1 and 6.1-7.53 As is evident from these texts, the sin is committed knowingly: a person chooses not to come forward and disclose information relevant to a legal case (5.1), or chooses to swear a false oath (6.1-7).54 These are not unintentional sins.55 At the same time, sacrificial atonement is available, and this suggests they are not presumed to be ‘high-handed’ either. Naturally, any sin – including those just named – could be such;56 this is why I call this category ‘intentional but not (necessarily) high-handed sin’. But the fact remains that there were certain intentional sins for which sacrificial atonement was possible. It is debated why such sins may be intentional but not high-handed; possibly, the law assumes that mitigating factors, such as fear or guilt or shame, could have been at play in these situations.57 Whatever the reason, the end result is three categories of sin, two of which were atonable by means of sacrifice and one of which was not.58 Atonable by means of sacrifice Unintentional Sins

53

54

55

56 57 58

Intentional but not (necessarily) high-handed sins

Not atonable by means of sacrifice High-handed sins

Lev. 6.1-7 corresponds to 5.20-26 in the Hebrew. Commentators generally agree that Num. 5.5-8 addresses the same situation as Lev. 6.1–7 (and adds a provision describing what to do if the offended party is dead [Num. 5.8]). See references in Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 479, n. 30. For the latter, see esp. NRSV’s rendering of 6.2-3, 5; see also discussion in Sklar, Leviticus (Zondervan), on these verses. In further support, note that ‘the words built on the roots šgg/šgh [describing unintentional sin] and the phrases wĕlōʾ yādaʿ [and he did not know] and wĕneʿlam mimmennû [and it was hidden from him] – at least one of which is used in every other case in Lev. 4–5 to indicate inadvertent sin (Lev. 4.2, 13, 22, 27; 5.2, 3, 4, 15, 17) – are conspicuously absent from each of these pericopes’ (Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 480). For example, swearing a false oath characterizes apostates in Zech. 5.3-4; Mal. 3.5. See Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 480, n. 33. The diagram is from Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 480. For possible explanations why Num.15 mentions only the outside categories and not the middle one, see Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, pp. 482–5.

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Atonement for high-handed sin – This leads to the question, How was atonement made for high-handed sins? There are several narratives in Exodus to Numbers in which the Israelites – or a large group of them – commit a high-handed sin and yet the Lord continues in relationship with the people as a whole.59 A survey of these narratives shows that atonement was possible by means of the work of a mediator who in some way effects atonement on the repentant sinners’ behalf,60 as happens when Moses prays on behalf of the people (Exod. 32.30-35 and 33.12-17; Num. 11.2; 14.13-20; 16.22), or Aaron offers incense for them (Num. 16.46-47 [17.11-12]; cf. also Num. 25.8).61 Significantly, however, it is possible for the Lord to discipline the people even after atonement has been made, and this discipline can be severe. For example, even though the Israelites who rebelled in Numbers 14 are forgiven, not one of them ever sets foot in the Promised Land (cf. Num. 14.20 with Num. 14.22-23).62 Such ongoing discipline does not appear to happen in the realm of sacrificial atonement, and this contrast appears to emphasize the severity of sinning with a high hand against the Lord. To this point, we might summarize the discussion of these three categories of sin – and the way atonement is made for each – as follows: The above means that Israelites were to have looked at atonement as an amazing testimony to the grace and mercy of a God who is ‘compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth, who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin’ (Exod. 34.6-7a). At the same time, such grace and mercy did not nullify that he is also a God who ‘by no means leaves the guilty unpunished’ (Exod. 34.7b), particularly with respect to high-handed sin. This in turn means the Israelites were to regard high-handed sin as their worst enemy, staying as far away from it, and from any 59

60

61 62

These include: ‘the golden calf (Exod. 32.1-34.28), the people’s complaining at Taberah (Num. 11:1-3), the people’s rebellion after the spies’ report (Num. 14.1-35), the people’s rebellion with Korah and company (Num. 16.1-40 [16.1–17.5]), the people’s rebellion after the death of Korah and company (Num. 16.41–50 [17.615]), the people’s rebellion after setting out from Mount Hor (Num 21:4–9), and the people’s idolatry at Shittim (Num 25.1-13)’ (Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 486; for other possible examples, see Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 486, n. 49). For repentance in these contexts, see Exod. 33.4; Num. 16.26-27a (note the people’s obedience to the Lord’s command and the way they distance themselves from the guilty); 21.7; 25.6b (the weeping at the tabernacle is an evident sign of mourning for their sin before the Lord); and perhaps also Num. 11.2 (compare with 21.7). Repentance is not mentioned in 14.1-35 or 16.41-50 (17.6-15), perhaps because of the focus given to the mediator’s role. ‘Even here, however, the text makes clear that the people’s rebellious action of stoning Moses is interrupted by the appearance of the glory cloud (Num. 14.10; 16.42 [17.7]), which elsewhere leads the people to humble – even fearful – reverence before the Lord (Exod. 20.18-21), and which presumably happens here as well’ (Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 486, n. 48). See further discussion in Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, pp. 485–8. See also Exod. 32.35; Num. 21.6–9. For other texts, see Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 489.

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type of intentional sin at all, as though their lives depended on it – because in fact they did.63

This summary also leads us to a key text in the discussion of sin and how it is dealt with by the Lord: Exodus 34.6-7. Exodus 34.6-7 – This text is relevant to the discussion of sin and atonement in general, but it is especially relevant to high-handed (apostate) sin because it is given in the immediate aftermath of such a sin: the golden calf (Exod. 32.1-14). After that event, Moses came down from the mountain and broke the stone tablets on which the covenant was written in order to show that the Israelites had broken the covenant itself (32.15-19). In Exodus 33, the Lord commands Moses to come up the mountain with two new tablets, a sure sign that the Lord was going to renew the covenant with his sinful people (33.1-4). It is in that context that the Lord proclaims his character to Moses in Exodus 34. The lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The lord, the lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ 6

The description consists of five characteristics (v. 6) and four actions (v. 7). The first two actions (‘keeping steadfast love … forgiving … sin’) are especially closely related to the five characteristics; Boda’s comments in this regard are worth quoting at length. The first two terms in v. 6 refer to God’s merciful and gracious character toward his people, and the last two terms in v. 6 refer to God’s loyal and faithful character toward his people. The first two emphasize his merciful openness to his people, and the last two his enduring commitment to them. In between these two sets (mercy and loyalty) lies Yahweh’s patience, motivated by his merciful attachment to his people and expressive of his faithful commitment. The first two participles in 34.7 reveal the impact of these characteristics on the action of God. Yahweh is a God who will be loyal to the enduring covenant relationship he has established with Israel (‘keeping covenant loyalty for thousands’). Even when his covenant partner fails him through iniquity, transgression, and sin … he will forgive the community and not abandon the covenant with his people.64 63 64

Sklar, ‘Sin and Atonement’, p. 491; see further pp. 488–90. Boda, A Severe Mercy, p. 45.

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This leaves the two actions of 34.7b (‘but who will by no means clear the guilty … visiting the iniquity …’), which at first glance appear to mean the Lord will indiscriminately punish a sinner’s child, grandchild and great-grandchild for the sinner’s wrongdoing. Closer attention to the larger context, however, provides other ways of understanding this text. Some argue that the Lord is stating he will punish future generations in the same way he punished their parents if they continue in the sins their parents committed.65 This is not impossible, but the explanation of Boda, and the narrative example he provides, perhaps better account for the data: Discipline on one generation had serious ramifications for the next three because they were all part of the same family unit … Widmer (2004: 328) explains it … ‘The judgment encompasses all succeeding generations as long as the rebellious age group remains alive.’ This is demonstrated in Israel’s experience in the wilderness: ‘While they are alive, the innocent youth are to remain with their parents in the wilderness as shepherds and are to partake in the punishment (14.33).’ The two wilderness generations show this principle in action. The judgment that befell the generation that came out of Egypt was experienced for 40 years by successive generations as they wandered around the wilderness. And yet, when that rebellious generation died, the new generation was given the opportunity to respond to Yahweh with obedience.66

In short, the point is not that the Lord is angry with the ‘third and fourth generations’; it is that the family unit is cohesive and the effects of sin impact more than the sinner himself or herself. Whichever of these two approaches is taken, the overall point of the passage remains the same. On the one hand, it serves as an encouragement – even to those who have fallen into the deepest pit of sin – that the Lord is indeed a merciful God who delights to extend mercy and forgiveness to his people as they turn back from sin and cling to him. It is because of this mercy that sin – even high-handed sin – can be forgiven. At the same time, the passage is a strong warning: the Lord’s mercy and grace is never to be taken for granted; he remains a God of justice and will bring that justice to bear against evil. Once 65

66

For good representatives of this position see M. M. Kalisch, A Historical and Critical Commentary on  Exodus with a New Translation (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), pp. 348, 586; and more recently, Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus (The New American Commentary; Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), pp. 454, 717. Boda, A Severe Mercy, p. 45, n. 30. The reference is to Michael Widmer, Moses, God, and the Dynamics of Intercessory Prayer: A Study of Exodus 32–34 and Numbers 13–14 (FAT 2/8; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).

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again, this means that his people are to view sin, especially high-handed sin, as a mortal enemy, one that can harm them and those most closely connected to them. The far wiser choice is to cling faithfully to the Lord who abounds in steadfast love and faithfulness. Leviticus 26 – The importance of clinging to the Lord in obedient faith is emphasized in Leviticus 26 both positively and negatively. Positively, those who walk in the Lord’s ways can expect to experience the blessings of the covenant, described here in terms of material provision and peace and close fellowship with the Lord (26.3-12). It is ‘nothing less than a return to Eden’.67 Negatively, those who rebel against the Lord can expect to experience the curses of the covenant, described here in terms of disease, defeat, starvation, exile and death (26.14-39). It is ‘nothing less than a living hell’.68 Even here, however, the Lord’s mercy is again seen. Near the beginning of the curses, the Lord makes clear that these are meant to act as a form of discipline that bring the Israelites back to him: ‘And if in spite of [these initial curses] you will not listen to me, then I will discipline69 you again sevenfold for your sins’ (Lev. 26.18).70 In other words, ‘The purpose of these judgments is restoration, not annihilation’.71 As a parent exercises discipline – even severe discipline – as an act of love for a wayward child, so too does the Lord for his wayward people.

Deuteronomy Deuteronomy closes the Pentateuch in dramatic fashion. It consists mostly of a series of speeches given by Moses shortly before he dies. Given how often the Israelites have rebelled against the Lord up to this point in the story, it is no surprise that sin and its consequences are a major theme in the book. Its teaching on these matters may be summarized under two major headings, the first making clear that sin has terrible consequences, the second that the Lord of mercy will forgive and receive back his penitent people. Sin has terrible consequences – In Deuteronomy, Moses emphasizes the terrible consequences of sin in two major ways. Sometimes, he refers back 67 68 69

70 71

Sklar, Leviticus, TOTC, p. 313. Sklar, Leviticus, TOTC, p. 313. The Hebrew word (yāsar) is sometimes translated ‘punish’, but context makes clear that the Lord’s actions are to correct harmful behaviour, and this sense is better captured by ‘discipline’ (so ESV, NET). See also vv. 23, 28. John D. Currid, A Study Commentary on Leviticus (EP Study Commentary; Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2004), p. 351. Cf. Ps. 94.12; Hos. 5.4-15.

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to Israel’s past rebellions against the Lord, and the terrible consequences that resulted, as a way of warning the Israelites against committing such sin in the present (1.26-35, 41-46; 4.3-4; 9.7-24). His point is clear: history will repeat itself; rebellion against the Lord will result in terrible consequences for the rebellious; learn from this and be wise. At other times, Moses simply spells out the terrible consequences that will come to those who disobey the Lord’s commands and contrasts this with the good that will come to those who follow in them. It is here that the language of blessing and curse is used: ‘See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse – the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods,  which you have not known’ (11.26-28).72 In this way, obedience is associated with a wide range of blessings that result in rich fulfilment in life under the Lord’s good pleasure (7.12-15; 28.1-14; 30.9, 16), while disobedience is associated with a wide range of curses that result in disease and despair and death under the Lord’s righteous anger (28.15-68). Only a fool would choose the latter path. Sadly, Israel would play the fool. Very early in the book, Moses anticipates that the Israelites will rebel against the Lord and experience the covenant curses, exile being foremost among them (4.25-28). Towards the end of the book, the Lord himself declares that the Israelites would turn away from him (31.16-20, 26-29), and even has Moses teach them a song – to stand as a witness against them – that describes their coming unfaithfulness (32.1-43). But all is not lost. In his mercy, the Lord welcomes back those who repent of their sin – Even as Moses anticipates that the Israelites will be sent into exile for their rebellion against the Lord (4.25-28), he also makes clear that there is a way back to the Promised Land (4.29-31). For Israel’s part, this involved a full-hearted turning back to the Lord: ‘But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul’ (4.29). For the Lord’s part, he would receive his repentant people back because of his mercy and faithfulness: ‘For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not

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See also 30.11-20. It is especially significant how often the Israelites are warned against idolatry and the terrible results that will come from engaging in it (4.15-28; 6.13-15; 7.3-4; 8.19-20; etc.). This shows not only that idolatry was a major temptation they faced but also that it is an especially dangerous sin, for it is not simply turning away from a command of the Lord, it is abandoning the Lord himself for another god.

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abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your ancestors, which he confirmed to them by oath’ (4.31). The former is grounded in the latter: the Israelites’ repentance is possible because the God before whom they repent is merciful towards penitent sinners. In a moving passage towards the book’s end (30.1-10), Moses expands on these ideas, describing in some detail the type of full-hearted repentance that will be required of the exiled Israelites (30.2, 10) as well as the merciful way in which the Lord will bring them back to the Promised Land and shower them with covenant blessings in place of covenant curses (30.3-5, 9). Significantly, in the very center of this passage, comes an added promise: ‘The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live’ (30.6). At the very least, this teaches the Israelites that even as they turn their hearts back to the Lord, they must also cry out to him for a new one. They must love him with all their heart, soul and strength (Deut. 6.5), and yet as sinful people they need to be empowered by him to do this very thing. The psalmist does not miss it; even as he turns his repentant heart back to the Lord, he cries out for the Lord to make it new: ‘Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me’ (Ps. 51.12 [10]). At the very most, the promise of the Lord’s work in the Israelites’ hearts looks forward to those passages that describe the formation of a new covenant, passages which emphasize the way in which the Lord himself will strengthen his people to love him wholeheartedly.73 In either case, it is clear once again that it is the Lord who must ultimately defeat sin in the lives of his sinful people – and that he will in fact do so. Sin will not have the last word.

Conclusion When it comes to sin in the Pentateuch, there are at least five significant themes that stand out from the above survey. First, sin is not part of God’s design for his creation; it is an intruder into this world and human nature that is both foreign and invasive. This is seen especially in the opening chapters of Genesis. In Genesis 1–2, no trace of sin can be found and the world is ‘very good’, brimming with life, and humanity is in perfect and peaceful relationship with God, each other, and the world. This is the world God made, and humanity is 73

Jer. 31.31-34; 32.38-40; cf. Ezek. 11.17-20; 36.24-27.

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blessed within it. In Genesis 3, sin invades this pristine goodness and ruptures humanity’s relationship with God, each other, and the world. Blessing and life are now replaced by curse and death. What is more, the invader does not leave. Instead, sin roots itself deeply, not only in the world, where it continues to bring death and destruction (Genesis 4–11), but also in the human heart, where it now lodges from our earliest days (Gen. 6.5; 8.21). The intruder is now a part of this world and those within it. In describing the first theme we come naturally to the second: sin is utterly destructive. Its history is a story of ruined relationships, severe suffering, and death. The Pentateuch is littered with these tragic consequences, from the shame and pain of Genesis 3, to the death and destruction of Genesis 4–11, to the severe punishments that rebellious Israel experiences in Exodus to Numbers and is promised in Deuteronomy to experience again for future rebellions. None of these things was a part of God’s purposes for this world. Sin is anti-creational, seeking to undo and destroy every good blessing God intends for his world and those within it. Not surprisingly, God does not stay silent. The third theme is that the Lord brings justice to bear against sin and also shows his mercy to sinners. His justice is seen in numerous ways: he exiles Adam and Eve from Eden (Gen. 3), washes the world of its pollution (Gen. 7), scatters those united in rebellion against him at Babel (Gen. 11), and brings strong discipline on his sinful people (Exod. 32.35; Num. 11.1; 14.22-23, 28-30, 34; 16.41-50 [17.6-15]). But his mercy shines through just as clearly: humanity is not destroyed but continues through Adam and Eve (Gen. 3.20; 4.1-2) and then again through Noah (Gen. 9.1); after rebellious Babel (Gen. 11.1-9), the Lord raises up a faithful line that leads to Abram (Gen. 11.20-26), whom he calls as a second Adam to be fruitful and multiply, and in whom he will bring blessing – the goal of creation (Gen. 1.28) – to all the families of the earth (Gen. 12.1-3); to his sinful people he provides priests and a sacrificial system and holy mediators to make atonement on their behalf (Exod. 32.30-35; 33.12-17; Lev. 8; 17.11; Num. 11.2; 14.13-20; 16.22; 16.46-47 [17.1112]); in describing the exile that will come to the Israelites for their rebellion, he also makes clear that he will forgive them, and bring them back, if only they will turn from their sin and seek him wholeheartedly (Deut. 4.25-31; 30.1-10); even in describing the curses that will come for their disobedience, the Lord makes clear that his ultimate goal is disciplining them for the sake of restoring them to himself (Lev. 26.18, 23, 28). The fourth theme is in response to the first three. It is that his people are to avoid sin as a mortal enemy (Lev. 18.24-40; 26.14-39), to repent of it whenever

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it is committed (Lev. 26.40; Deut. 4.29-31; 30.2, 10), and to cling to the Lord of steadfast love (Deut. 6.5; 10.20). They are to do this in order to live life under his good pleasure (Lev. 26.3-12; Deut. 7.12-15; 28.1-14; 30.9, 16), and to fulfil their priestly calling to reflect his image into the world (Exod. 19.5) – thus making it a place in which the blessings of Eden are known as far as the curse is found (Gen. 12.3). The fifth and final theme is that the Lord himself must not only forgive sin but also be the one to defeat it and remove it from his creation. This can be seen with regard to sin committed by individuals and with regard to sin’s general presence in the world. At the individual level, the Lord is not only the one who provides the means of atonement for sinners (Lev. 17.11), he is also the one who must strengthen them – renew their hearts (Deut. 30.6) – in order that they might avoid sin and walk in his good and upright ways. At the global level, sin’s entry into the world is met immediately with the Lord’s promise that he will one day destroy it (Gen. 3.15). Sin will be vanquished; Eden will be restored. As the biblical story continues, it becomes clear that this promise both is and will be realized in Jesus. It ‘is’ realized in that Jesus has provided himself as the final sacrifice for sin (Heb. 1.3; 10.12), has freed his followers from the power of sin (Jn 8.34-36; Rom. 6.6), and has dealt a death blow to the evil one who brought sin into this world (Lk. 10.18; Jn 12.31; 16.11). But the war is not yet over. And so his people wait for the day when the promise ‘will be’ realized in Jesus in a full and final way, the day when he makes his victory over sin complete. Revelation makes clear that in that day heaven will descend to earth (Rev. 21.2), God and the Lamb will establish their thrones here (Rev. 22.3), and will fully and finally defeat sin and curse and death in the lives of their people (Rev. 21.3-4; 22.3). It is a day in which humanity will again enjoy perfect and peaceful relationship with God, each other, and the world – and will feast freely on the tree of life (22.2). The sin of Genesis 3 will be no more and the glories of Genesis 1–2 will be known with even great glory. This is a day for which his people long, a day which has led them throughout the ages to cry: ‘Come Lord Jesus!’

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Prophets Mark J. Boda

It is hardly a challenge to justify a consideration of the prophets in a volume devoted to the topic of sin. Summaries of the message of the prophets like Zechariah 1.4: ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Turn now from your evil ways and from your evil deeds”’ remind readers of the Old Testament of the dominant role of the prophets to confront the community for its sinful behaviour. Of course, there is more to the prophetic witness than accusation of sin, but Zechariah did focus on the most common message of the prophets throughout the Old Testament canon. The present article will trace the nature of sin within the Hebrew canonical division called ‘the Prophets’ and highlight dominant strategies for dealing with sin.1 The ‘Prophets’ traditionally has been sub­divided into the Former (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the Latter (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve) Prophets and so our analysis will consider these two sections in turn. As we will soon see, these two subdivisions have distinct yet related theological emphases.

Former Prophets Undergirding the Former Prophets is the covenantal framework articulated in the book of Deuteronomy.2 One can see the influence of Deuteronomy in 1

2

For a review of vocabulary and imagery related to sin in the Prophets see Mark J. Boda, ‘Sin, Sinners’, in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, ed. Mark J. Boda and J. Gordon McConville (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012), pp. 713–19; for a fuller review of the issues raised in this article and articulation of my approach to biblical theological study see Mark J. Boda, A Severe Mercy: Sin and Its Remedy in the Old Testament, Siphrut: Literature and Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures 1 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), pp. 1–13, 122–356. On the Former Prophets as Deuteronomic History see the seminal work of Martin Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1943); Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, JSOTSup 15 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1981); cf. Albert de Pury et al., Israel Constructs Its History:

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key texts like Joshua 7.11, 15; 24.25; Judges 2.1, 20; 1 Kings 11.11; 19.10, 14; 2 Kings 11.17; 23.1-3.3 Thus sin must be seen, first and foremost, as a violation of covenant (Josh. 23.16; 2 Kgs 17.15, 35, 38; 18.12), that is, of the relationship between Yahweh and his people established at Sinai. As made clear by the two sections of the Ten Commandments, the covenant has vertical and horizontal axes, focused on the people’s relationship with Yahweh as well as with one another. Of course, the vertical and horizontal are not always easily isolated from one another as will become evident below.4 The priority of the vertical axis is made clear by the fact that key violations in the Former Prophets are related to worship of Yahweh. Deuteronomy emphasizes two core values for the worship of Israel.5 First, the exclusive object of worship was to be Yahweh (Deut. 13; cf. Deut. 5.7-9; 6.13-14) and, second, the exclusive place of worship was to be the central location that God would designate once they entered the land (Deut. 12). These two Deuteronomic core values related to worship explain the inclusion of many of the major narratives found in the Former Prophets. Deuteronomy 7.1-5 links the extermination of the Canaanites to these core values of exclusivity of worship. A Canaanite presence in the land would mean an enduring temptation to serve other gods at their worship sites. This theological value explains the emphasis in the book of Joshua on the removal of the Canaanites from the land, but also the concern expressed and illustrated throughout the book of Judges of the impact upon the Israelites of an enduring Canaanite presence (Judg. 1.1-2.5; 2.11-3.6). This theme of exclusivity of worship dominates the key speeches which conclude the book of Joshua. In ch. 22 Joshua confronts the Transjordan tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh over the construction of an altar at the Jordan River. The Transjordan tribes explain that this altar is not a rival worship site, but rather a witness to the Cisjordan tribes that the Transjordan tribes have the right to worship Yahweh at the central shrine in the land of Israel. The focus of this encounter is thus on the exclusive worship of Yahweh

3

4

5

Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research, JSOTSup 306 (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). The Davidic ‘covenant’ is thus subsumed within this broader covenantal framework, evident not only in the fact that the word covenant is not mentioned in 2 Sam. 7 but also in the warning that God would discipline disobedient royal figures (2 Sam. 7.14). The poem in 2 Sam. 23.5 does refer to the ‘everlasting covenant’ established with David, but this is only introduced at the end of David’s life to prepare for the transition to a new generation. For sin in the Former Prophets see Terence E. Fretheim, ‘Repentance in the Former Prophets’, in Repentance in Christian Theology, ed. Mark J. Boda and Gordon T. Smith (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical, 2006), pp. 25–46. See esp. Richard D. Nelson, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 9–10.

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at the exclusive place of worship. Joshua’s speeches in chs 23–24 continue this emphasis on exclusivity of worship, reaching a climax in Joshua’s warning in 24.19, ‘You will not be able to serve Yahweh’ and his challenge in 24.23, ‘Now therefore, put away the foreign gods which are in your midst, and incline your hearts to Yahweh, the God of Israel’.6 The covenant that is then formalized in 24.25-27 is one that focuses on exclusivity of worship. These closing speeches in Joshua cast a dark shadow across the remaining books of the Former Prophets. Joshua’s presaging of Israel’s struggle with worship of other gods and worship at illicit sites is evident from the beginning of the book of Judges where it is linked to the enduring presence of Canaanites in the land. When Yahweh’s messenger confronts the people in Judges 2.1-5, he links their worship of other gods to their covenant relationship with the Canaanites and their refusal to tear down Canaanite altars. Illicit worship sets in motion two of the major stories of the Judges, those of Othniel and Jephthah (3.7; 10.6, 10-16), and for the rest of the major stories ‘the evil thing’ at the outset is probably a reference to illicit worship (3.12; 4.1; 6.1; 13.1).7 The destructive behaviour of Abimelech in Judges 9 is sponsored by the temple of Baal Berith at Shechem. Judges 17–18 trace the origins of illicit worship at Dan (see below) to the establishment of a shrine away from the exclusive place of worship. Violation of exclusive worship of Yahweh is an initial concern in the book of Samuel. Samuel’s family follows the value of exclusive worship at the central shrine (1 Sam. 1). It is clear, however, as Samuel moves to Shiloh that illicit practices have crept into the exclusive worship of Yahweh at the exclusive place of worship (1 Sam. 2-3), and God judged the family of Eli for these violations. As Samuel takes over the reins of power in Israel, his first speech calls for repentance from worship of other gods (1 Sam. 7.3). After this point in the book of Samuel the focus shifts away from sin related to worship (on the rest of Samuel see further below). This emphasis on worship violations, however, reemerges in the book of Kings and dominates the narrative to the end of the Former Prophets. While the depiction of Solomon’s reign is largely positive, references to illicit worship bracket the account in 3.1-2 and 11.1-8.8 Immediately after the second bracket 6

7

8

The translations in this article are based on the NASB 1995, revised at times for gender inclusivity or translation preference by the author. This is seen in the Gideon narrative in the fact that Gideon is called to tear down the Baal altar. For ‘evil thing’ as worship of other gods, see Mark J. Boda, ‘Judges’, in Numbers–Ruth, Revised Expositor’s Bible Commentary 2, ed. Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), p. 1102; Robert B. Chisholm, A Commentary on Judges and Ruth, Kregel Exegetical Library (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2013), p. 180. Jerome T. Walsh and David W. Cotter, 1 Kings (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1996), p. 138.

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the narrator describes Yahweh’s judgement on Solomon, linking it explicitly to the fact that he pursued other gods (11.9-10), activity that would lead to the loss of the northern tribes from the kingdom of his son (11.11-13). The dire consequences of such idolatry for the Davidic line are made clear in Yahweh’s promise and warning in 1 Kings 9.3-9. There Yahweh promises to establish the Davidic dynasty forever, but if Solomon or his descendants turn away from Yahweh by worshipping other gods the nation will be exiled and the temple destroyed. Violation of the Deuteronomic exclusive worship values continue to dominate the remainder of the book of Kings during the period of the Divided Kingdom. Ironically it is Jeroboam, the one raised up by God as the fulfilment of his judgement on Solomon, who would establish illicit worship practices which would spell the end of the northern kingdom. The sins of Jeroboam are mentioned at regular intervals throughout the remainder of the book of Kings, sins which entailed the forming of golden calves for worshipping other gods at the two non-central locations of Bethel and Dan facilitated by non-levitical priests (1 Kgs 12.25-33; cf. 14.9; Deut. 12; 18.1-8).9 These ‘sins of Jeroboam’, as introduced by the founder of the northern kingdom and continued by his successors on the throne (1 Kgs 15.30, 34; 16.31; 2 Kgs 3.3; 10.29, 31; 13.2, 11; 14.24; 15.9, 18, 24, 28; 17.22), would ultimately lead to the downfall of the northern kingdom and its exile to Assyria (2 Kgs 17.2123). The violation of the worship values of Deuteronomy is showcased most vividly at the centre of the book of Kings in the key account of the struggle between Elijah and the Baal (and Asherah) Prophets of Jezebel and Ahab on Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18). Sins like Jeroboam’s are catalogued throughout the history of the southern kingdom after Solomon. Some kings sought to eradicate the high places and/ or the worship of other gods with varying levels of success (e.g. 1 Kgs 15.11-15; 22.43; 2 Kgs 12.2-3; 14.3-4; 15.3-4; 15.34-35), but among the southern kings it is only Hezekiah and Josiah who hold fully to the Deuteronomic values of exclusive worship of Yahweh at the exclusive place of worship (2 Kgs 18.3-4; 23.4-20). For the southern kingdom the sins of Manasseh would seal its demise as a nation (2 Kgs 21.2-16; 23.26-27; 24.3-4). His sins are listed in detail in

Although often the evil of Jeroboam is seen as just providing inappropriate cult objects for the worship of Yahweh, the Dtr identifies these as ‘other gods’ in 1 Kgs 14.9; cf. 2 Kgs 17.7-12, 16. Also 1 Kgs 12.32 speaks of ‘sacrificing to the calves’ zbḥ Piel + l; Hos. 11.2; Hab. 1.16; Ps. 106.38; 2 Chron. 28.23; 33.22.

9

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2 Kings 21.1-9, and include violation of both exclusive worship of Yahweh and exclusive worship at the temple (see further below). Other sins throughout the Former Prophets are related to the Israelites’ relationship with Yahweh, even if not focused on the Deuteronomic values of exclusive worship at the central shrine. Achan takes plunder from Jericho which had been dedicated to Yahweh alone and as a result he and his family are stoned (Joshua 6–7). 1 Samuel 8, 10 and 12 make clear that Israel’s request for a king like the other nations (8.5) was an affront to Yahweh’s leadership over the nation. Yahweh allows and even superintends the appointment of their first king, but Saul embodies the nation by disobeying God’s instruction through the prophet (1 Sam. 10.8; 13.8-14). The sinful nature of David’s military census is not clear from 2 Samuel 24, but possibly it is related to a lack of trust in Yahweh to bring victory. Lack of trust may also explain the prophetic judgement delivered by Isaiah to Hezekiah after he showed the Babylonian envoys his treasures in 2 Kings 20.12-21. Deuteronomy’s exclusive worship values are expressed in the declaration of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5.7-11. The first section of the Ten Commandments is foundational for what follows in Deuteronomy 5.12-21 which shifts from worship to ethics, regulating caring relationships between members of the covenant community. While violations of Deuteronomy’s exclusive worship values dominate the presentation of history in the Former Prophets, violations of moral law are not lacking. Judges depicts murder in the stories of Abimelech (Judges 9) and the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19–20). The story of David in Samuel lacks a major focus on worship violation and in its place is a litany of ethical infractions set in motion (2 Sam. 12.10) by David’s coveting and rape of Bathsheba and murder of Uzziah (2 Sam. 11). The stories which follow include the rape of Tamar and murder of Amnon (2 Sam. 13), the rebellion and death of Absalom (2 Sam. 15–18). The murder of the prophets (1 Kgs 18.4, 13; 19.10; 2 Kgs 9.7) is closely connected with the worship violations of Ahab and Jezebel. However, the episode revolving around Naboth’s vineyard showcases covetousness, murder, and bearing false witness apart from illicit worship (1 Kgs 21). Moral misdeeds are also highlighted in the greed of Gehazi, Elisha’s servant (2 Kgs5) and the murderous tyranny of Queen Athaliah (2 Kgs 11.1-2). While there is no question that the worship violations of Manasseh sealed the fate of Judah (2 Kgs 21.10-16; 23.26-27; 24.3), 2 Kings 21.16 and 24.4 also highlight the ‘innocent blood’ which he had spilt. It is difficult to discern whether this refers more generally to murder of the underprivileged during his

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reign, or more specifically to the illicit cultic rite of child sacrifice (passing one’s child through the fire; 2 Kgs 21.6; cf. Deut. 12.31).10 The phrase ‘shed innocent blood’ occurs in Jeremiah 7:6 in a list of illicit behaviours between oppression of aliens, orphans, widows and pursuit of other gods. In favour of the connection to oppression is the use of this phrase in Jeremiah 22.3, 17 which focuses exclusively on oppression (cf. Deut. 21.7; Ezek. 22). In favour of the connection to illicit worship is Jeremiah 19.4-5 where the phrase occurs in a context referring to sacrificing to other gods with explicit mention of sons burned in the fire. While difficult to resolve, the close association between illicit worship and injustice is a reminder of the integrated nature of the Ten Commandments (see further below). Sin and its accompanying guilt and punishment is understood in terms of corporate solidarity in the Former Prophets. This is first encountered in Joshua 7 in the story of Achan whose sin not only led to the demise of his entire family, but also to judgement on Israel as a nation through the loss of life and battle at Ai. This example is brought up again in Joshua 22 along with the example of the iniquity of Peor (Num. 25.1-9) as the Transjordan tribes are confronted over the building of an altar which threatened the entire nation (Josh. 22.10-20). Similarly Benjamin is implicated in the sin of Gibeah when they do not distance themselves from that evil city in their midst (Judg. 19-21). While these are examples of the intragenerational nature of sin, guilt and punishment, at times one sees an intergenerational character. The most prominent example is the ‘sin of Manasseh’ already introduced above, which the Deuteronomists say so stained the nation that the exile was inevitable, even after the renewals enacted by Josiah (2 Kgs 23.26-27; cf. 21.10-16; 24.3). But there are others, including the judgement on Saul in 2 Samuel 21.1, on David in 2 Samuel 12.10-14, on Solomon in 1 Kings 11.11-13, on Baasha in 1 Kings 16:12-13, on Ahab in 1 Kings 21.28-29 and on Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20.16-18, all of which indicate a judgement transferred to a future generation.11 There is some debate over how this intergenerational principle relates to the Deuteronomic principle found in Deuteronomy 24.16 and cited in 2 Kings 14.5 (cf. Jer. 31.30; Ezek. 18.4,

10

11

E.g. Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 268; Walter Brueggemann, 1 & 2 Kings, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2000), pp. 534, 571, who focus on injustice. See strategies of repentance which take into account this intergenerational principle in Lev. 26.39-40; Ezra 9; Neh. 1, 9; and Dan. 9; Mark J. Boda et al. (eds), Seeking the Favor of God—Volume 1: The Origin of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism, SBLEJL 21 (Atlanta/Leiden: Society of Biblical Literature/Brill, 2006).

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20, see below), that each generation is responsible for its own sin.12 Resolution to this issue may be found in the closing chapters of 2 Kings.13 While the sin of Manasseh has stained the land irreparably the penitential response of Josiah showcases how a future generation is not held responsible for the sin if it rejects the patterns of the former generation and embraces the priorities of Yahweh. The generations that followed Josiah did experience the judgement because they exemplified the same guilty behaviour of Manasseh.14 Throughout the Former Prophets sin is dealt with in a variety of ways. On a regular basis God sends messengers and leaders to confront the people, warning them of approaching judgement and calling them back to patterns consistent with the covenant Yahweh established with his people. The Deuteronomic lists of blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 27–28 (30) are key motivators to turn the people from sin and the narratives throughout the Former Prophets depict the operation of these blessings and curses in the life of the nation. Solomon’s vision for prayer at and towards the temple in 1 Kings 8 has been influenced by this Deuteronomic vision and provides a way for the people individually and corporately to return to Yahweh when disciplined. Key speeches throughout the Former Prophets challenge its readers to return to God (e.g. Josh. 22-24; Judg. 2.1-5; 1 Sam. 7.3-10; 2 Sam. 24.10; 2 Kgs 19.14-19; 22.11-13, 19) and show how important mediatorial figures are for renewal in Israel. At times this involves challenging exhortations, but also intercession and sacrifice on behalf of the nation (1 Sam. 7, 12; 2 Sam. 24). The surprising example of wicked Ahab in 1 Kings 21.27-29, reveals the role of repentance in the theology of the Former Prophets. Nevertheless the Former Prophets consistently show that without a penitential response, divine judgement is inevitable (2 Kgs 17, 25), a principle made clear in the book of Deuteronomy (Deut. 4.23-28; 29.24-26) and throughout the Former Prophets (Josh. 24.20; 1 Kgs 9.9). This review reveals that the history related in the Former Prophets is not one that hides the dysfunctional character of the people and leaders of Israel and Judah. Noth argued long ago that his Deuteronomic History (Deut.–2 Kgs functioned as a theodicy, justifying God for the intensity of the punishment

12

13 14

Boda, Severe Mercy, pp. 181–6; cf. Joel S. Kaminsky, Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible, JSOTSSup 196 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995). Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), p. 319. Similar to this is 2 Kgs 17.21-23, which points to the sins of Jeroboam as key, but follows this up with the statement: ‘The children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they did not depart from them until Yahweh removed Israel from his sight, as he spoke through all his servants the prophets.’ It is not just the sin of Jeroboam but the fact that the following generations continued in those sins.

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which had befallen Israel and Judah.15 While there is truth to this, the proposal of Wolff is important to note, that is, that this historical tradition is also designed to prompt repentance.16 Deuteronomy 30 makes clear that the community in exile would have the opportunity to repent and key speeches, prayers, and summaries throughout the Former Prophets are designed to guide and elicit a penitential response by the community in exile (e.g. Josh. 24; 1 Sam. 7; 1 Kgs 8; 2 Kgs 19; 2 Kgs 22–23). In the end, however, it is von Rad’s emphasis on the gracious promises found in the Former Prophets (e.g. 2 Sam. 7; cf. 2 Kgs 25.27-30) which provides the theological foundation for hope for the exilic community and for those readers prompted to admit the justice of God’s discipline and confess the reality of their failure as a community to remain faithful to the covenant.17

Latter Prophets The presentation of sin in the Latter Prophets continues the focus on the double axes (vertical and horizontal) already encountered in the Former Prophets.18 The prophets showcased in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve, express deep concern over dysfunctional relational patterns exemplified by the people towards Yahweh and towards one another.19 Isaiah expresses concern over idolatry throughout its various sections, noting the folly but also the rebellion of a people who worship idols (e.g. Isa. 2.8, 18, 20; 30.22; 31.7; 40.18-20; 41.29; 42.8, 17; 44.9-20; 45.16, 20; 46.1-2; 48.5; 57.13; 66.3). This is an issue for audiences in the Assyrian to Persian periods, 15 16

17 18

19

See Noth, Deuteronomistic History. H. W. Wolff, ‘Das Kerygma des deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk’, ZAW 73 (1961): 171–86; Hans Walter Wolff, ‘The Kerygma of the Deuteronomistic Historical Work’, in Reconsidering Israel and Judah. Recent Studies on the Deuteronomistic History, ed. Gary N. Knoppers and J. Gordon McConville (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000), pp. 62–78; Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), pp. 339, 346. Possibly the Former Prophets (or DtrH) constitutes a confession of sin as von Rad, Old Testament Theology, p. 337; Ralph W. Klein, Israel in Exile: A Theological Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), p. 23; Martin Rose, ‘Deuteronomistic Ideology and Theology of the Old Testament’, in Israel Constructs Its History: Deuteronomist Historiography in Recent Research, JSOTSup 306, ed. Albert de Pury, Thomas Römer and Jean Daniel Macchi (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 424–55; cf. Fretheim, ‘Renewal’, pp. 25–46. Gerhard von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy, SBT 9 (London: SCM Press, 1953), p. 89. Although there are differences between the Former and Latter Prophets, Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, Old Testament Library (London: SCM Press, 1961), 391, probably drives too much of a wedge between the two. See Carol J. Dempsey, ‘“Turn Back, O People”: Repentance in the Latter Prophets’, in Repentance in Christian Theology, ed. Mark J. Boda and Gordon T. Smith (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical, 2006), pp. 47–66.

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as Israel and Judah lived in the shadow of empires and their religious systems.20 At the same time Isaiah expresses concern over injustice, attacking those who abuse the vulnerable (e.g. Isa. 3.14-15; 5.7, 8, 18, 20, 23; 10.1-2; 26.10; 30.12; 33.15; 56.1-2, 11; 57.1-2, 17; chs 58–9). While the two issues of illicit worship and unjust behaviour in the above passages are treated largely in isolation, a close look at the opening chapter of Isaiah reveals their close connection.21 Although Isaiah 1 comprises two separate prophetic sections (Isa. 1.2-20; 1.21-31), these two sections share in common a concern that the people are abusing the vulnerable within the community, focusing in both cases on the murdered, orphaned, and widowed (Isa. 1.15c, 17; 1.21, 23). In both cases these injustices are intertwined with dysfunctional patterns of worship. In Isaiah 1.2-20 abuse of the vulnerable is taking place in the midst of orthodox worship practice (Isa. 1.10-15b) which is deemed hypocritical and thus unacceptable to God. In Isaiah 1.21-31 the abuse is intertwined with heterodox worship practice as the people are engaged in nature cults related to sacred oaks and gardens (Isa. 1.29-31). Isaiah 1 orients the reader to the presentation of sin in the Latter Prophets. Attacks related to the vertical axis continue to focus on illicit worship practice, but illicit worship practice is not only related to the worship of other gods, but also to the worship of Yahweh. The prophets will consistently attack Israel for dividing worship and ethics, the vertical and horizontal axes, and seek for reintegration. So serious are these abuses in worship and ethics that both pericopae in Isaiah 1 attack the community for rebelling against (pš‘) and abandoning (‘zb; 1.2-4, 28) Yahweh.22 This same vocabulary will appear again at the conclusion to Isaiah (Isa. 65.11; 66.24) within a broader section that attacks the lack of ethics (Isa. 56.1–2, 11; 57.1–2, 17; Chs. 58–59) among a community involved in orthodox and heterodox worship practices (Isa. 56-59, 63-66). Another key issue related to the vertical axis of Israel and Judah’s relationship with Yahweh is the lack of trust, an issue that dominates Isaiah 6–55.23 The crises of faith experienced by Ahaz and Hezekiah structure Chapters 7–39 and function as examples for the exilic community and beyond to live faithfully 20

21

22

23

On the audiences of Isaiah see Mark J. Boda, ‘Authors and Readers (Real or Implicit) and the Unity/ Disunity of Isaiah’, in Bind Up the Testimony: Explorations in the Genesis of the Book of Isaiah, ed. Daniel Block and Richard Schultz (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2015), pp. 255–71. See now the exhaustive study on this topic in Bohdan Hrobon, Ethical Dimension of Cult in the Book of Isaiah, BZAW 418 (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2010). ‫פשׁע‬, in particular, is common in Isaiah, appearing also in 24.20; 27.4 and then ten times in Isa. 40–55 and seven times in Isa. 56–66; cf. John Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1–39, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 38, who adds that this rebellion is linked with pride in Isaiah. Oswalt, Isaiah 1, p. 55.

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among the nations.24 Ahaz’s lack of trust is attacked by Isaiah (Isa. 7), while Hezekiah’s faith in Yahweh is rewarded (Isa. 36–38). Between these two episodes the community’s sin is described in terms of trusting resources other than Yahweh, whether religious (Isa. 28.15-19), economic (Isa. 30.12-14) or political (Isa. 30.1; 31.1-3). This material arising from the crisis of faith in the Assyrian period was relevant for those living under Babylonian hegemony. The introductory material in Isaiah 40.12-31 highlights the struggle of those facing powerful religious and political entities in the Babylonian period. The prophet carefully presents a case for the inadequacy of these Babylonian religious and political powers in comparison to Yahweh. It is shameful to trust in idols and their images (42.17). Jeremiah echoes Isaiah’s dual emphasis on sinful behaviour, noting especially illicit worship (e.g. Jer. 2.7; 7.18, 31; 8.2, 19; 10.1-18; 11.13, 17; 13.10; 16.18-20; 44.7-19; cf. 50.2, 38; 51.17-18, 47, 52) as well as social sins including injustice, adultery, murder and false witness which threatened others within the community (e.g. Jer. 2.34; 5.28; 7.5, 8; 21.12; 22.3).25 As with Isaiah there is an intertwining of the vertical and horizontal axes, for example, in the lists found in Jeremiah 7.6 and 9: If you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, nor walk after other gods to your own ruin … (Jer. 7.6) Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery and swear falsely, and offer sacrifices to Baal and walk after other gods that you have not known …? (Jer. 7.9)

These lists again reveal a close association between illicit worship of the deity and unjust treatment of the community. At the same time, Jeremiah focuses significant attention on the internal dispositions which underlie this illicit activity of worship and ethics, highlighting ‘the stubbornness of one’s evil heart’ (e.g. Jer. 7.24; 9.14; 11.8; 13.10; 16.12; 18.12). The heart as the source of sin is noted in Jeremiah 17:9 which speaks of the heart as ‘desperately sick’. It is this heart that must be washed of its evil, since wicked thoughts live inside the person (Jer. 4.14). This revelation about the internal nature of sin is symbolized in Jeremiah 17.1 as letters written with an iron stylus on a stone tablet. Such emphasis on the internal source of sin is not surprising

24 25

Oswalt, Isaiah 1, p. 55; Christopher R. Seitz, Isaiah 1–39 (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1993), pp. 64–5. See J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 110–12; Victor J. Eldridge, ‘Jeremiah, Prophet of Judgment’, Review & Expositor 78 (1981): 322–5.

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for the prophet who promised that Yahweh would write the law upon the hearts of the community (Jer. 31.30). Ezekiel continues the prophetic attack on ‘the people’s civil and cultic sins,’ that is confronting failure on the horizontal and vertical axes.26 Injustice is evident throughout as the prophet highlights the bloody violence (murder) and oppression (robbery, abuse of poor) in the city of Jerusalem (Ezek 7.11-13, 23; 8.17; 11.6-7; 12.19; 13.18-23; 22.23-31; 33.14-16). Illicit worship is rampant as well (Ezek 5.11; Ch. 6, 7.20, 23; Ch. 8; 11.6, 18, 21; 14.3-7; Ch. 16; Ch. 20; 23.37; 37.23) and includes importing foreign cults into the temple precincts and passing children through the fire Ezekiel also joins the other prophets in intertwining the vertical and horizontal axes.27 The repeated material throughout Ezekiel 18 highlights what is and what is not practising justice and righteousness: But if a person is righteous and practises justice and righteousness, and does not eat at the mountain shrines or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, or defile his neighbour’s wife or approach a woman during her menstrual period – if a person does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, does not commit robbery, but gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with clothing, if he does not lend money on interest or take increase, if he keeps his hand from iniquity and executes true justice between person and person, if he walks in my statutes and my ordinances so as to deal faithfully – he is righteous and will surely live,’ declares the Lord God. (Ezek. 18.5-9)

The list reveals that the practice of ‘justice and righteousness’ involves not only caring for the vulnerable and refraining from oppression, but also abstaining from illicit cultic activity and ritual uncleanness. It is probably not incidental 26 27

Michael Fishbane, ‘Sin and Judgment in the Prophecies of Ezekiel’, Int 38 (1984): 134. Henry McKeating, Ezekiel, OTG (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic: JSOT, 1993), pp. 85–91; John Goldingay, Israel’s Faith (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2006), p. 256.

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that illicit worship is placed at the top of the list, an indication that injustice flows out of the illicit cult. This integration of the two axes is also evident in Ezekiel 22.1-16. Ezekiel 22.3 refers to the city which sheds blood and also makes idols and Ezekiel 22.4 to the guilt arising from bloodshed and defilement arising from idol production. In Ezekiel 22.9 slanderers who shed blood also eat at the high places. The lists of sins throughout this section highlight the dysfunctional character of the community: dishonoring parents, oppressing aliens, wronging fatherless and widows, committing sexual immorality and abuse, taking bribes, interests and unjust profits (Ezek. 22.6-7, 10-12). Ezekiel 33.25-26 also intertwines cultic and civil sins, referring to eating meat with blood in it and worshipping idols alongside acts of murder and sexual immorality. Ezekiel’s unique contribution to the prophetic corpus is its greater focus on priestly concerns and employment of priestly vocabulary.28 Breaking of the Sabbath regulation is of particular concern for Ezekiel (Ezek. 20.12, 13, 16, 20, 24; 22.8, 26; 23.38; cf. 44.23) as is lack of attention to ritual cleanness regulations (Ezek 18.6; 22.10, 14, 26; 33.25; 39.24; cf. 44.23). Terms like abomination (tô‘ēbâ; e.g. Ezek. 6:9; 11.21; 18.24; 43.8), profaning (ḥll; e.g. Ezek. 20.16), impurity (tm’ Piel, Ezek. 5.11; 36.17; 43.7–8), and unfaithfulness (ma‘al, Ezek. 14.13; 18.24; 39.23), all reflect the priestly tradition.29 Ezekiel also draws on two key relational motifs in the ancient world to highlight the sin of the people. The first is the marital motif in which the people are pictured as an unfaithful wife and Yahweh as the faithful husband (Ezek. 16, 17, 20). The second is the vassal treaty motif which governed relations between nations in the ancient world (Ezek. 17.11-21). In Ezekiel 17 although the treaty was established between Judah and Babylon (Ezek. 17.13), the treaty, broken by Judah, is traced back to Yahweh (Ezek. 17.19). Similar trends can be discerned throughout the Book of the Twelve (Hosea– Malachi). Hosea employs the marital motif through his actions and speeches to depict vividly the unfaithfulness of Israel. Sins in view are clearly illicit worship activity (Hos. 4.4-19; 6.1–6; 8.4-6, 11-3; 9.1; 10.1-8; 13.1-3), but Hosea 4.1-3 highlights the prophet’s concern over sins against fellow Israelites which include: ‘swearing, deception, murder, stealing, and adultery … violence … bloodshed follows bloodshed’ and which are identified as signs that there is ‘no faithfulness or kindness or knowledge of God in the land.’ The proximity of 28

29

See Ka Leung Wong, The Idea of Retribution in the Book of Ezekiel, VTSup87 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 120; cf. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Vol. II, p. 24. McKeating, Ezekiel, p. 87; Wong, The Idea of Retribution in the Book of Ezekiel, p. 133; Goldingay, Israel’s Faith, p. 256.

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Hosea 4.1-3 to 4.4-19 suggests a link between injustice and illicit worship, but Hosea 6.4–11 makes this link more explicit. There Yahweh expresses his delight ‘in loyalty rather than sacrifice … knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings’ (Hos. 6.6). Lack of loyalty and knowledge of God is showcased in Hosea 6.7-9 in the murderous acts of a band of priests. Also intertwining injustice and illicit worship is Hosea 8.11-14 in which Yahweh rejects the sacrifices of Ephraim because of their iniquity and sin which are linked to the building of palaces. Amos focuses most of its attention on injustice: their crimes would fill an out-sized police-blotter: enslaving their countrymen for petty debts (2.6; 8.6), perverting justice for the disadvantaged (2.7-8; 5.10, 12, 15), practicing incest (2.7), exacting harsh taxes (2.8; 3:10; 5.11), throttling the prophets who would condemn such deeds (2.12; 3.8; 7.12-13), maintaining an extravagant life-style at the expense of the poor (4.1; 6.1-6).30

However, concern is at times expressed over the illicit cult of the northern kingdom (e.g. Amos 1.7; 3.14; 4.1-5; 526; 8.14). Amos 5.21-24 highlights Yahweh’s rejection of worship practised by those involved in injustice. The image of Israelites beside an altar stretched out on a garment taken unjustly or in the temple drinking wine confiscated illicitly highlights the interconnectedness of inappropriate worship and unethical behaviour (Amos 2.8). This is also evident in the juxtaposition of the oppression of the poor and needy by the ‘cows of Bashan’ in Amos 4.1-3 with worship activity (sacrifice and tithes) at Bethel in Amos 4.4-5. Micah is similar to Amos with its dominant focus on injustice. Micah pronounces woe on those who first covet and then rob families of their land (Mic. 2.1-2). The prophet speaks of those who rob passers-by of their garments and evict women from their homes (Mic. 2.8-9). This behaviour is linked to the ruling class of the society, a group that is pictured as cannibals eating the flesh and skin of the people (Mic. 3.1-4). Their acts of injustice include murder, violence and bribery (Mic. 3.9-11; 7:2-3). Injustice includes deceitful and violent practices related to their business dealings (Mic. 6.10-12). Even the closest relationships are typified by dysfunctional behaviour as neighbours and friends cannot trust one another and children treat their parents contemptuously (Mic. 7.5-6). At times, though, Micah is concerned with illicit worship practices which will be judged (Mic. 1.7; 5.12-14). Micah 6.6-8 once again highlights the

30

David Allan Hubbard, Joel and Amos: An Introduction and Commentary, TOTC (Leicester / Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1989), p. 111.

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interconnectedness between worship and ethics,31 as the prophet challenges the assumption that God delights in sacrifices, highlighting instead the divine requirement: ‘to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’. While Joel and Jonah provide few details about the sin in view,32 more information is provided in Obadiah and Nahum. The books of Obadiah and Nahum are directed towards foreign nations (Edom, Assyria) and emphasize sinful patterns on the international level between people groups. Obadiah’s behaviour is identified as violence (Obad. 10), exemplified by their involvement in the fall of Judah and Jerusalem (Obad. 11–14), inappropriate for a sibling (Nah. 10). For Nahum, Nineveh is ‘the bloody city, completely full of lies and pillage’ (Obad. 3.1), thus worthy of punishment due to these offences against their fellow human beings. Nahum 1.14, however, also announces judgement against Nineveh’s false worship as Yahweh promises to eliminate its idols from its temple. Habakkuk focuses on the perversion of justice that surrounds him, noting in particular: violence, iniquity, wickedness, destruction, violence, strife, contention (Hab. 1.2-4). A similar focus on injustice dominates the list of sins in the prophetic material in Habakkuk 2.4-19, even though at one point there is an attack on illicit worship (Hab. 2.18-19). In its opening chapter Zephaniah ‘combines criticism of cultic apostasy with indignation against the social injustice by which the rich and powerful exploit the poor’.33 The prophet intertwines attacks against illicit cult practices (Zeph. 1.4-6, 9) with attacks against injustice (Zeph. 1.9, 13, 18), making clear once again the connectivity between the realms of worship and ethics. This connectivity is showcased as well in Zephaniah 3 as Jerusalem’s leaders are singled out for profaning the sanctuary and failing to maintain justice (Zeph. 3.1-5). 31

32

33

Noted also by Philip Peter Jenson, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah: A Theological Commentary, LHB/OTS 496 (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), p. 100: ‘religion and ethics [are] inseparable’; cf. Rick R. Marrs, ‘Micah and a Theological Critique of Worship’, in Worship and the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honour of John T. Willis, JSOTSup 284, ed. M. Patrick Graham, Rick R. Marrs and Steven L. McKenzie (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 184–203; and M. Daniel Carroll R, ‘He Has Told You What is Good: Moral Formation in Micah’, in Character Ethics and the Old Testament: Moral Dimensions of Scripture, ed. M. Daniel Carroll R and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), pp. 103–18. See the vigorous debate on whether the book of Joel refers to a repentance from sin or just a return to God in covenantal relationship or prayer; cf. G. Ogden, ‘Joel 4 and Prophetic Responses to National Laments’, JSOT 26 (1983): 97–106; Ronald A. Simkins, ‘“Return to Yahweh”: Honor and Shame in Joel’, Semeia 68 (1994): 41–54; Eliyahu Assis, The Book of Joel: A Prophet between Calamity and Hope, T&T Clark Library of Biblical Studies (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); James Nogalski, The Book of the Twelve: Hosea–Jonah, The Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2011), and helpful review in Joel Barker, From the Depths of Despair to the Promise of Presence: A Rhetorical Reading of the Book of Joel, Siphrut 11 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014), pp. 144–51. Jonah refers more generally to wickedness and violence (Jn 3.8), the latter clearly linked to human relationships with one another. Rex A. Mason, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Joel, OTG (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994), p. 55.

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In Haggai the failure of the people is connected with their lack of attention to the reconstruction of the temple. This failure has rendered their sacrifices defiled and invited divine curse on their agricultural and economic activity. Zechariah, however, returns to an agenda more aligned with the earlier prophets (Zech. 1.1-6; 7.7-14). The vision reports found in Zechariah 5 interconnect the earlier prophetic attacks against injustice (Zech. 5.1-4) and illicit worship (Zech 5.5-11).34 So also Zechariah 7–8 shows the people the problem of engaging in orthodox worship practices (fasting, feasting) while oppressing the poor. Idolatry and illicit revelatory practices associated with it are highlighted in Zechariah 10.1-2; 13.1-6. Finally, Malachi attacks both people and priests for illicit cult activity (permitting unacceptable sacrifices in Mal. 1.6-14), before confronting both groups for unjust behaviour: the priests, for showing partiality in administering justice at the temple (Mal. 2.1-9), and the people, for divorcing wives (Mal. 2.10–16). Withholding the tithe is also highlighted in Malachi 3.8-12. The list of sinners in Malachi 3.5 emphasizes offences on the horizontal axis (committing adultery, swearing falsely, oppressing the wage earner, widow, orphan, alien), while mentioning sorcery, more closely associated with offences on the vertical axis.35 This review of sin in the Latter Prophets has highlighted the dual focus of these books on dysfunction in the relationship between Israel and their God and between Israel (and nations) and their fellow human beings. Dysfunctions in relationship between Israel and God appear in both heterodox and orthodox worship. Attacked is the worship of idols and other gods as well as utilizing pagan locations and practices for worship. But also of concern is hypocritical worship that involves cultic acts without passionate pursuit of God and ethical purity. At times these sins are treated in isolation from one another, but in nearly every prophetic book key passages show the interconnectedness of the vertical and horizontal relational axes.36 Heterodox worship is always disallowed, but it 34

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On the interconnection between the two vision reports in Zech. 5 see Mark J. Boda, Zechariah, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), p. 321. Cf. D. N. Premnath, ‘Malachi’, in Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, Joel B. Green, Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Rebekah Miles and Allen Verhey(eds) (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), p. 504, who sees ‘the lasting value’ of Malachi in its ‘pointed exploration of the connection between worship and ethical/moral practices’. On this interconnectedness between ‘religious practice and worship’ see further M. Daniel Carroll R, ‘Seek Yahweh, Establish Justice: Probing Prophetic Ethics – An Orientation from Amos 5:1-17’, in The Bible and Social Justice: Old Testament and New Testament Foundations for the Church’s Urgent Call, ed. Cynthia Long Westfall and Brian R. Dyer (McMaster New Testament Studies; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), pp. 64–83; cf. Hilary Marlow, ‘Justice for Whom? Social and Environmental Ethics and the Hebrew Prophets’, in Ethical and Unethical in the Old Testament: God and Humans in Dialogue, LHB/OTS 528, ed. Katharine J. Dell (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), p. 109, who refers to the close link ‘between worship of God and social structures’ in Micah, Isaiah and Amos. This close

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is also often connected to unjust treatment of other human beings within the community. Although orthodox worship is appropriate, it is attacked by the prophets when it is used to cover over injustice. As with the Former Prophets, intra- and intergenerational principles can be discerned within the Latter Prophets. A person’s sins can affect one’s own generation (Isa. 13.16; 14.21; Jer. 11.22-23; 18.21; Amos 7:17), as well as future generations (Isa. 65.6-7; Jer. 2.9; 15.4; 16.10-13; 29.32; Ezek. 20.21-24). However, Jeremiah 31.29-30 and Ezekiel 18 confront anyone who would use this to justify sin, showing that each generation has the opportunity to repent. Throughout the Latter Prophets sin is dealt with in a variety of ways. Isaiah 1 identifies two key strategies. Isaiah 1.2-20 highlights the role of the prophet confronting the people with their sin (Isa. 1.2-15) and then exhorting them to repent (Isa. 1.16-17). Isaiah 1.21-31 highlights the role of divine discipline to purify the people from their sin (Isa. 1.25).The prophetic ideal is the first of these two strategies as assumed in the prophetic process underlying Isaiah 6:10b (see … hear … understand … repent … be healed) and showcased for example in Jeremiah 18, 25, Ezekiel 2–3, 20, 33, Amos 4, Joel 2, Jonah 3 and Zechariah 1.1-6. But all the prophetic books contain significant material related to the second strategy, highlighting the ultimate failure of the first strategy. In the wake of this failure of the first strategy and employment of the second strategy, the prophets reveal a third strategy for dealing with sin: the unilateral gracious initiative of Yahweh. This is first seen in Isaiah 40–55 as Yahweh declares his gracious comfort and redemption of the community in exile. We are then introduced to a servant figure who emerges from the exilic community and through intense exilic suffering takes on the sin of the community, establishing a new generation of servants to become children for Zion (Isaiah 52–54). This strategy is filled out further in Jeremiah’s revelation of the unilateral gracious initiative of Yahweh to forgive his people (24.6; 31.34; 32.37-38, 41-44) and infuse them with a new heart on which is written the law (24.7; 31.33; 32.39-40).37 This is filled out further in Ezekiel who speaks of God’s promise to forgive the people and grant them a new heart and a new spirit (Ezek. 11.19; 36.26-27; 37.14; 39.26).38

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connection between the vertical and horizontal axes is echoed in the New Testament in Matthew 22.37-40; 1 Jn 4.20-21. Jeremiah Unterman, From Repentance to Redemption: Jeremiah’s Thought in Transition, JSOTSup 54 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987), p. 177. Paul M. Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary, LHB/OTS 482 (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), pp. 26–31; see Hendrik Leene, ‘Ezekiel and Jeremiah: Promises of inner renewal in diachronic perspective’, in Past, Present, Future: The Deuteronomistic History and the Prophets, Oudtestamentische Studiën 44, ed. Johannes C. de Moor and H. F. Van Rooy (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 150–75; Margaret S. Odell,

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Isaiah 59.20-21 and Zechariah 12.10-14 also look to a divine gift of the Spirit for the community. This final revelation is key for our reading of the Prophets, both Former and Latter. While the Former Prophets justified the judgement which had befallen both Israel and Judah and provided a way forward by reminding the community of God’s gracious promises and the community’s need for repentance, the Latter Prophets reveal the divine agenda to ensure relational faithfulness. This divine agenda is foreshadowed in the foundational Deuteronomic vision in Deuteronomy 30.6 in which Yahweh promised to circumcise the hearts of the people after the exile and in the cry of Solomon in 1 Kings 8.58 for Yahweh to ‘incline our hearts to himself, to walk in all his ways and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, which he commanded our fathers’. But it is only in the Latter Prophets that we see how this divine agenda will be fully realized among the people of God.39

Ezekiel, Smith & Helwys Bible Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2006), p. 443, on similarities and differences between Jeremiah and Ezekiel. This strategy of unilateral gracious initiative of Yahweh is also echoed in the New Testament; cf. 2 Cor. 3.3.

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Writings Christopher B. Ansberry

The Writings are an eclectic collection of documents. Similar to the Law and the Prophets, the variegated documents within the Writings do not conceptualize sin in a monolithic way. Sin has many faces, and the diverse texts within the Writings profile the contours of sin’s silhouette from distinct vantage points, through different literary forms and within a variety of frameworks. This does not mean that the documents within the Writings offer a fresh, novel perspective on sin. Many of these texts conceptualize sin in a manner comparable to the Law and the Prophets. Similar to the Law and the Prophets, Ruth (Ruth 1:1a; cf. Judg 17:6; 21:25), portions of Daniel (Dan. 1.8; 3.12; 6.12-13; 9.1-18), Ezra–Nehemiah (Ezra 9.1-15; Neh. 9.2) Chronicles (e.g. 2 Chron. 6.16, 22-42; 7.12-22; 25.4; 29.20-28), and many psalms (Ps. 24.4; 26.6; 51.7, 10; 73.13) view sin through the matrix of Israel’s covenantal and cultic traditions in general (Exod. 20.5; Lev. 11.13-47; 14.14; 15.5-31; 18.24-30; Deut. 7.1-6) and the blessings and curses of covenant relationship in particular (Lev. 26.1-45, Deut. 28.1–68). And similar to the Prophets (Isa. 14.12-14; Ezek. 28.1-19), certain nations are characterized as evil empires in Esther and Daniel, as countries marked by hubris that perpetuate various structural sins (Dan. 3.15; 4.29-30; 5.22-23; Esth. 1.22; 5.9-14; 6.6-9). The documents within the Writings do not exist in a canonical twilight zone; many describe sin in a manner comparable to the Law and the Prophets. But this is not the case for other texts within the Writings. While the Psalter views sin within the general confines of Israel’s covenantal and cultic traditions, the documents within the wisdom tradition give particular attention to distinct dimensions of this multifaceted phenomenon. In the light of these diverse perspectives, this chapter will explore the Writings’ conception of sin by attending to the Psalter as well as the wisdom literature.

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Sin and the Psalter As noted above, sin has many faces in the Writings. The internal structure and the external contours of many of these faces are given graphic description in the Psalter. As Athanasius contended, this poetic anthology is like a mirror in which one sees the manifest diversity of their creatureliness and through which one may understand their condition.1 The Psalter is one of the most introspective documents within the Old Testament. And its brazen introspection offers a distinct perspective on the Writings’ presentation of sin as well as moral selfhood. The Psalter’s view of the moral self – that is, the individual’s ability to think and to choose and to act in accordance with wisdom and the divine will – is dynamic and varied, in part because it is intimately related to the Psalter’s view of sin.2 Several poems, for example, intimate that humans are capable of making choices that are compatible with the divine will (Ps. 18.20-24; 26.1-5).3 That is, humans possess the ‘moral equipment’ to choose and to act rightly.4 This vision of the moral self is illustrated through the Psalter’s characterization of the ‘righteous’ (ṣaddîq), a person who embodies covenant fidelity and lives in accordance with YHWH’s will (Ps. 37.30; 112.1-10; 125.3). In addition, this vision of the moral self is implied in several poems in which the psalmists acknowledge their sin. According to these poems, it seems that sin is not due to faulty moral equipment; rather it is due to a faulty will and the improper use of one’s moral equipment (Ps. 32.3-5; 38.18; 51.2-3).5 Humans sin; but by virtue of their repentance, they acknowledge what is good, turn to what is right, and demonstrate their innate ability to choose what is good. This perspective on the moral self is counterbalanced, however, by other poems that assume humans are deeply flawed creatures who are unable to think, choose and act rightly. According to these poems, humans do not possess the ‘moral equipment’ to live in accord with the divine will (Ps. 51.5; 53.1-3; 130.3;

1

2

3

4

5

Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (Classics of Western Spirituality; New York: Paulist, 1980), pp. 101–30. For discussion of the moral self in Hebrew Bible, see Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Can These Bones Live? The Problem of the Moral Self in the Book of Ezekiel (BZAW 301; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000); Carol A. Newsom, ‘Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism’, JBL 131 (2012): 5–25. For the sake of convenience, this essay follows the versification of the English text, rather than the Masoretic text. Following Lapsley, Can These Bones Live?, pp. 8–10, esp. p. 10. Lapsley designates this form of agency as ‘“virtuous” moral selfhood’. See Lapsley, Can These Bones Live?, p. 10.

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143.2);6 they suffer from congenital sinfulness; their faculties are incapacitated by sin.7 While this vision of the moral self is woven through the poetic fabric of the Psalter, it is given particular attention in Psalm 14. From YHWH’s vantage point, the poet declares that all humans have ‘gone astray’; the entire lot is ‘morally corrupt’; ‘there is no one who does good, no, not one’ (Ps. 14.3). These distinct perspectives on the moral self in the Psalter are not mutually exclusive. In general, the Psalter assumes that all humans suffer from innate sinfulness. Nonetheless, their ‘moral equipment’ may be sensitized, even rehabilitated through relationship with YHWH and knowledge of his will. This knowledge is not necessarily intrinsic to the human condition; rather it comes from outside of the human agent. To be specific, the psalmists’ knowledge of YHWH as well as the human condition appears to come from YHWH’s redemptive acts in history as well as the regulations of the covenant (Ps. 19.7-14; 105-106; 119). Together, these sources of knowledge determine and dictate the nature of divine–human relations in the Psalter. All the prayers and didactic poems within the anthology assume this relationship with God, a relationship formed through knowledge of YHWH’s character and revelation of the divine will. And this knowledge enables the psalmists to use their ‘moral equipment’ in order to recognize sin, to repent of sin, and to live rightly in relation to God. This is not true, however, of all people within the Psalter, for the anthology contains a cavalcade of characters that epitomize the nature and debilitating effects of sin on the human condition. These characters include the wicked, the fool and sinners, on the one hand, and adversaries, evildoers and enemies, on the other. The character types within these distinct classes are not synonymous, but their relationship may be described as co-referential: they refer to the same reality, the same type of person in a given context.8 The questionable characters within these groups not only project an alternative moral worldview, but they also embody character traits that stand in sharp contrast to the Psalter’s conception of normative character, a character marked by righteousness, uprightness, justice, fear and trust in the divine.9 In general, these despicable character types are depicted as functional atheists (10.3-4, 13; 50.22; 64.5-6; 6

7

8

9

See Lapsley, Can These Bones Live?, pp. 8–10, who designates this form of agency as ‘“neutral” moral selfhood’. See Hans-Joachim Kraus, Theology of the Psalms, trans. Keith Crim (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), pp. 156–7; Robin C. Cover, ‘Sin, Sinners’, ABD 6:32–34. See P. Cotterell and M. Turner, Linguistics & Biblical Interpretation (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 160–1. For discussion of the virtues that mark the righteous and the vices that mark the wicked in the Psalter, see Gordon J. Wenham, Psalms as Torah: Reading Biblical Song Ethically (Studies in Theological Interpretation; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), pp. 139–66.

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94.7), who traverse crooked paths (1.6; 36.4; 49.12-13), assault the upright and the disenfranchised (10.2, 8; 11.2; 37.14; 143.3), delight in exploitation and injustice (94.5-6), ridicule the divine and trust in wealth as well as idols (49.6; 52.7; 115.8). They are unable to receive instruction, for sin has debilitated their cognitive faculties and incapacitated their ‘moral equipment’ (50.16-17; 58.3-5; 92.5-7; 119.69-70). They hate the righteous (25.19; 34.21); they love violence, evil and deceitful speech (11.5; 52.3-4); and they long to devour God’s people (35.25). In light of their distorted moral vision, twisted dispositions and perverted desires, it is not surprising that destruction resides in their inward parts, their throat is an open grave, their mouths are filled with cursing, their teeth are spears, and their tongue is a sharp sword (5.9; 10.7; 52.2; 57.4; 64.3). Through vivid images and diverse conceptual metaphors, the Psalter describes sin as an all-encompassing, embodied phenomenon. Sin affects one’s character, cognitive faculties, attitudes, desires, tastes, speech, actions and moral vision. Sin dwells within humanity, warps their organs of perception, and creates an alternative moral world, marked by inattention to God, the worship of pseudogoods, a distortion of love, a desire for dominance, as well as an indifference to consequences and casualties. The component parts of this inclusive conception of sin are developed through the Psalter’s attention to the relational dimensions of human existence. As elsewhere in the Old Testament, the Psalter views humans as ‘constellary’ beings,10 as agents who live in dynamic relationship with themselves, others, the broader community, the created order, and God. The Psalter explores these relational dimensions of human life and conceptualizes the nature and effects of sin through specific conceptual metaphors.11 Each dimension deserves a brief comment. With reference to oneself or bodily existence, the Psalter bears witness to the psychological and physiological effects of sin. Here sin tends to be described through the conceptual metaphor sin is sickness. Various poems indicate that the sin of the individual, the scheming of the wicked or the imminent onslaught of enemies haunt the psalmist, causing emotional anguish as well as physical disintegration (Ps. 6.2-3, 6-7; 13.2; 18.4; 22.14-15; 31.9-10; 51.8; 55.4-5). The psalmist’s sin produces brittle bones, festering lesions and burning loins (Ps. 10

11

Bernd Janowski, Arguing with God: A Theological Anthropology of the Psalms, trans. Armin Siedlecki (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), p. 49. Following George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, metaphor is a cognitive activity that transforms abstract concepts into more concrete forms of knowledge. In so doing, metaphor influences and illuminates how people think and perceive the world. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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32.3-4; 38.5, 7); it kindles anxiety, sorrow, guilt and groaning (Ps. 6.6-7; 32.3, 5; 38.18; 119:136). And it brings about public humiliation as well as social abandonment (Ps. 31.11; 38.11; 88.8). In addition, the voice and presence of the wicked inflicts the psalmist with fear, trembling and horror (Ps. 55.3-5), while savage enemies and evildoers devour the psalmist and inaugurate a reign of terror (Ps. 18.4; 22.12-13, 16), marked by distress, shame and darkness (Ps. 31.9, 11; 143.3-4). Sin is a sickness that not only affects the psalmist’s emotional and physical health from within, but also infects the psalmist from sinners without; it is described as a phenomenon that awakens unsettling emotions, saps one’s vitality and breeds hostile agitators. Together with sin is sickness, several poems describe the individual or personal effects of sin through the conceptual metaphors sin is a power, sin is a weight and sin is a stain. The power of sin is given particular expression in Psalm 36.1-4. Here transgression entices the heart, shapes one’s disposition, clouds one’s perception, blunts one’s intellectual capacity, fosters perverted desires, and generates destructive thoughts, speech and actions. It possesses the capacity to overpower the individual (Ps. 119.133), to breach the walls of the mouth, to infiltrate the heart and to transform one’s allegiances (Ps. 141.3-4). In view of the power of sin, it is not surprising that the psalmists call for YHWH’s protection and deliverance from its force and dominion. As a sickness and a power, the Psalter construes sin as a fierce enemy that affects one’s emotional and physical well-being. When this powerful force infects the individual and is diagnosed in the context of divine–human relations, it is described through the images of a weight and a stain.12 Similar to priestly or cultic conceptions, the Psalter views sin as a heavy load or a physical blemish that encumbers and soils the individual (Ps. 32.1; 38.2, 4; 51.1-2, 7, 9; 103.12). It possesses a ‘certain “thing”-like quality’;13 it connotes a state of personal culpability that weighs down, contaminates and marks the individual. And this state necessitates divine mercy and intervention to remove the burden of sin and cleanse one from its stain (51.4; 103.12). The Psalter gives particular attention to the personal nature and effects of sin. This personal perspective, however, represents only a portion of the 12

13

In addition to a weight and a stain, the expression ‘I will pay my vows’ (nĕdāray ʾăšallēm) intimates that certain poems may conceptualize sin through the metaphor sin is debt (Ps. 22.25; 50.14; 56.12; 61.8; 65.1; 66.13; 116.14, 18). Nonetheless, the connection between ‘I will pay my vows’ and payment for sin in these poems is ambiguous. In fact, the relationship between the expression and sacrifices of thanksgiving or praise may suggest the concept of sin is debt does not play a formative role in the Psalter’s discussion of sin. For discussion of the expression as well as the metaphor, see Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 43–54. Anderson, Sin: A History, p. 19.

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Psalter’s story, for the anthology bears witness to the way in which sin reverberates throughout the sinner’s environment and manifests itself in the corporate life of the community. As noted above, the Psalter views sin as a phenomenon embodied in certain characters. And it describes sin through certain conceptual metaphors. These metaphors influence the Psalter’s portrayal of specific character types and the way in which their sinful actions affect others. Just as sin is a power, so also the wicked are depicted as ferocious beasts, skilled trappers, and tyrannical oppressors that pursue, catch, afflict and kill the psalmists as well as marginalized members of the community (Ps. 10.2, 8–9; 35.17; 37.14; 109.16; 119.110; 140.5; 141.9; cf. 22.12-13, 16). They disseminate evil and destroy interpersonal relationships through false testimony and malicious gossip (Ps. 35.11-16, 20-21; 41.6-9; 109.2-5). In light of these forms of monstrous evil, the poet of Psalm 109 calls on YHWH to judge not only the perpetrator of these crimes, but also his household (Ps. 109.9-13). In so doing, the psalmist intimates that sin not only affects the sinner, but it also implicates and involves others. Sin and its consequences cannot be confined to individual actions, intentions or states; it has a ripple effect, engulfing one’s household, interpersonal relationships and others within the community. This broader, corporate vision of sin is especially apparent in poems that reflect on the life and state of the community. These psalms tend to view communal sin from two different vantage points. The first concerns the sins of former generations, which reverberate through space and time and influence or threaten later generations. The metaphors sin is rebellion and sin is amnesia pervade these poems (Ps. 78.7-8, 10-11, 17-18, 56-57; 106.6-7, 13, 21). Whereas Psalm 78 and 95.8-11 incorporate these metaphors in their historical recital of the sins of past generations to instruct present and future generations in covenant fidelity (Ps. 78.5-8), Psalm 106 includes these metaphors so that the present generation might identify with the sins of the past, confess its culpability, and invoke from YHWH restoration from exile. The former poems use the sin of the past as an object lesson for the present; the latter uses the sin of the past to describe its trans-generational influence, to define the present state of the community, and to stem the tide of sin. These reflections on the sins of the past differ from the Psalter’s second perspective on communal sin. In addition to the generational nature and consequences of sin, several psalms describe structural sins and their communal implications. This structural vision of sin contributes to the conceptual metaphor sin is a power. When despicable character types enjoy communal favour or occupy positions of power, they oppress the weak, exploit those entrusted to

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their care, and breed communal corruption. This perspective on structural sin serves as the backdrop of Psalm 73, where the wicked are depicted as a walking advertisement for pride, violence and oppression, for they are prosperous, healthy, wealthy and at peace (Ps. 73.3-12). And this vision of structural sin is reiterated in Psalm 94, where the wicked prevail within the community, crush the people, and kill the widow, the stranger and the orphan (Ps. 94.3-6; cf. 146.7-9). As a power, sin’s reach is not limited to the individual; it possesses the capacity to infiltrate the structures of the community and overpower its constituents. In this respect, the Psalter’s vision of structural sin is comparable to its perspective on the cosmic scope of sin. Just as certain psalms reflect on oppressive power structures in Israel, so also other poems reflect more broadly on oppressive power structures within the nations and the cosmos.14 In fact, Psalm 58 and Psalm 82 provide a vivid description of the oppressive powers structures within the universe. Together, these poems offer a cosmic perspective on power structures that oppress members of society in general and the marginalized in particular. This cosmic perspective is captured by the reference to ‘gods’ in the opening verses of these poems (Ps. 58.1; 82.1).15 The designation suggests that the poems envision heavenly beings as those who governed particular people groups (cf. Deut. 32.8-9).16 And the assumed homology of heavenly beings and their earthly counterparts in governance illuminates the cosmic scope of oppressive power structures within these poems. While Psalm 58 describes the way in which heavenly beings deliver unjust verdicts and spread violence in the earth through human agents (Ps. 58.2.3), Psalm 82 elaborates on the nature of this unjust judgement and violence: these heavenly beings show partiality to the wicked and fail to protect the weak, the fatherless, the poor and the destitute (Ps. 82.2-4). They promote an alternative moral worldview, marked by injustice, exploitation and oppression. And these vices form the pillars of a power structure that thrives on domination and threatens the well-being and flourishing of the cosmos as well as the global community. Far from confining the nature and effects of sin to the individual, the Psalter describes the way in which sin manifests itself in interpersonal relationships, 14

15

16

See Steven J. L. Croft, The Identity of the Individual in the Psalms (JSOTSup 44; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987), pp. 15–48. For discussion of the text-critical issues in 58.1, see Marvin E. Tate, Psalms 51–100 (WBC 20; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990), pp. 82–3. See Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 1–59: A Commentary, trans. Hilton C. Oswald (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), p. 535; Tate, Psalms 51–100, p. 85; John Goldingay, Psalms, Volume 2, Psalms 42–89 (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms; Grand Rapids; Baker Academic, 2007), pp. 201–4.

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the Israelite community and even the cosmos. Nonetheless, according to the Psalter, all sin, whether personal, interpersonal, communal or cosmic, is ultimately against God (Ps. 51.4). Sin triggers a divine response. In most cases, this response is cast in general terms (Ps. 1.6; 3.7; 7.6-9; 9.5-6, 16; 94.23; 98.9; 146.5-9). In other cases, YHWH’s response to sinful character types, groups or nations is cast in emotive terms (Ps. 5.6; 11.4). Irrespective of its form, the psalmists operate under the assumption that YHWH will manifest his justice and righteousness by executing judgement upon the wicked as well as the psalmists’ enemies. This judgement is rooted in the character–consequence connection, according to which YHWH metes out appropriate punishment to individual characters or groups, rather than to specific actions.17 Nonetheless, the nature and timing of this judgement remains ambiguous (see Ps. 73). This ambiguity mirrors the ambiguous nature of sin in the Psalter. While sin has many faces in the anthology, its complexion and finer features are unclear. Sin is embodied in different characters, conceptualized through diverse metaphors, and portrayed within the diverse dimensions of human existence; but the Psalter has little to say about specific types of sin.18 In the same way, sin is an internal and external reality that affects all humans. The anatomy of sin, however, is not the focus on attention within the anthology. Terms within the semantic field of sin may illuminate particular aspects of its form: ‘iniquity’ (ʿāwo­n) may connote ‘the personal guilt or culpability of the sinner’; ‘transgression’ (pešaʿ) may refer to ‘willful rebellion’; and ‘evil’ (raʿ) may connote ‘the injurious effects of sinful behavior’.19 But in light of the Psalter’s witness, it seems the phenomenon is more than the sum of these semantic parts. The diverse genres within the Psalter and the compendium’s extended compositional history suggest the poems provide us with snapshots of how sin was conceived at various points in ancient Israelite history. As a mosaic of snapshots that 17

18

19

Character–consequence is a more accurate designation than act–consequence, for the Psalter generally links consequences to character traits, attitudes and lifestyles, rather than individual actions. While some argue that these consequences are built into the order of creation or the actions themselves (K. Koch, ‘Is There a Doctrine of Retribution in the Old Testament?’, in Theodicy in the Old Testament [ed. J. L. Crenshaw; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983], pp. 57–87), this mechanistic view of reward and punishment is unconvincing, for it fails to account for YHWH’s intimate involvement in the process as well as his inscrutable timing in the execution of retribution and reward. For discussion of the character–consequence connection, see L. Boström, The God of the Sages: The Portrayal of God in the Book of Proverbs (ConBOT 29; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1990), pp. 90–133; Raymond Van Leeuwen, ‘Wealth and Poverty: System and Contradiction in Proverbs’, HS 33 (1992): 25–36. Mark J. Boda, A Severe Mercy: Sin and Its Remedy in the Old Testament (Siphrut 1; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), p. 517. J. Clinton McCann, Jr., A Theological Introduction to the Book of Psalms: The Psalms as Torah (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), pp. 102–3.

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include sin, the Psalter suggests that sin is a universal reality and an embodied phenomenon that infiltrates and affects every dimension of human existence.

Sin and the Wisdom Literature The contours of sin in the Psalter are comparable to its profile within the wisdom literature. Similar to the Psalter, the wisdom tradition contends that sin is a universal human phenomenon (Prov. 20.9; Job 4.17-21; 15.14-16; 25.4-6; Qoh 7.20, 29). Certain documents employ the conceptual metaphors sin is a stain (Prov. 20.9; 30.12; Job 4.17; 8.6; 9.30-31), sin is rebellion (Job 13.23; 34.37) and sin is amnesia (Prov. 4.5; 31.5; Job 8.13; Qoh 12.1, 6). The poetic pieces within the wisdom literature include a common cast of characters that embody and portray the multifaceted dimensions of sin. And these texts operate under the assumption that YHWH responds to sin by meting out appropriate rewards and punishments to specific character types. Despite these common threads, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes describe sin in distinctive ways. The contribution of these documents to the canonical tapestry of sin deserves specific comment.

Sin and Proverbs As a document concerned with the (trans)formation of character through the inculcation of wisdom and virtue (Prov. 1.2.7), Proverbs provides a distinct view of the moral self. This vision of the moral self is developed under certain assumptions concerning sin and its effects on the moral and intellectual capacity of humans to act in accordance with wisdom. And these assumptions are inherent in Proverbs’ characterization of different character types. Among the character types within the anthology, the wise, the fool, the righteous, and the wicked may be the most significant. Whereas the wise accept correction and internalize knowledge (Prov. 2.1; 9.8; 10.8, 14; 12.5; 13.1; 15.31), fools are distinguished by their indifference to knowledge (Prov. 1.22). In fact, a particular species of fools (ʾĕwîl) is unable to learn, for their moral perversion and rejection of discipline incapacitates their moral and intellectual equipment (Prov. 1.7; 15.5).20 The intellectual polarity between the wise and 20

See Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 18A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), pp. 40–2.

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the fool is comparable to the moral polarity between the righteous and the wicked. Whereas the righteous are the epitome of moral virtue, those marked by the establishment of justice (Prov. 17.15, 16; 18.5, 17; 24.24; 25.26), loyalty (Prov. 12.5), generosity (Prov. 21.26), mercy (Prov. 12.10; 29.7), reliability (Prov. 12.7, 12; 14.32; 18.10; 28.1) and honesty (Prov. 10.11; 13.5), the wicked are the embodiment of vice, those characterized by greed (Prov. 10.3), violence (Prov. 10.6), deceit (Prov. 12.5), perverse speech (Prov. 10.32; 11.11; 15.28) and cruelty (Prov. 12.10). The characterization of these figures and the co-referential relationship between the wise/righteous and the fool/wicked illuminates an important facet of Proverbs’ view of sin and the moral self. The pedagogical programme of Proverbs operates under the assumption that humans possess an innate ability to choose wisdom and act in accord with the moral order. This ability, however, ‘exists in potential only’;21 it must be shaped, aligned, and directed by external instruction and correction. The wise/righteous possess the receptive posture necessary to acquire instruction. The fool/wicked, on the other hand, do not possess this posture: they reject instruction, despise correction, follow their distorted perceptions, and do what is right in their own eyes. In this respect, Proverbs envisions sin as a failure to seek wisdom, a failure to accept discipline and, by implication, a failure to live in accordance with the moral order YHWH has woven into the fabric of the cosmos (Prov. 8.36).22 Put differently, Proverbs envisions sin as a failure to actualize human potential and to be authentically human.23 This vision of sin is developed in discrete ways within Proverbs. Like the Psalter, Proverbs explores the individual, interpersonal, communal and divine– human dimensions of sin through the attitudes, speech, and actions of certain characters. Sin is an embodied phenomenon that warps one’s perception (Prov. 26.12, 26); its nature and desires are illustrated through the way in which particular characters prey on the innocent (Prov. 1.10-14), exploit the helpless (Prov. 13.23; 23.10; 29.7), promote social injustice (Prov. 17.23; 18.5; 19.28; 21.7), destroy interpersonal relationships (Prov. 11.9; 14.21; 25.18), unleash chaos in the household as well as the community (Prov. 11.11; 19.26; 21

22

23

Anne W. Stewart, Poetic Ethics in Proverbs: Wisdom Literature and the Shaping of the Moral Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2015); T. Frydrych, Living Under the Sun: Examination of Proverbs and Qoheleth (VTSup 90; Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 134. This potential is especially apparent in the characterization of the ‘uncommitted’ (petî), a personage who is neither wise nor foolish, neither righteous nor wicked, but malleable and capable of acquiring wisdom (Prov. 1.4). Mark E. Biddle, Missing the Mark: Sin and Its Consequences in Biblical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), p. 57. Biddle, Missing the Mark, p. 57.

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28.24; 29.6, 8) and elicit divine disgust and judgement (Prov. 6.16-19; 16.5). In addition to its external appearance, sin is described through internal dispositions, ranging from a perverted heart (Prov. 6.14, 18; 11.20) and pride (Prov. 16.5; 18.12) to anger (Prov. 15.18; 19.19; 22.24-25) and jealousy (Prov. 27.4). And sin is conceptualized through the metaphor life is a path. This metaphor not only identifies the orientation of one’s life, but it also illuminates one’s character, conduct, and the consequences associated with their behaviour. It is part of a larger metaphoric system that includes the concepts of wisdom and folly, life and death.24 With this metaphorical framework, Proverbs indicates that those characterized by folly, wickedness and evil traverse the path of death, a path marked by the pursuit of distorted desires or pseudo-goods and oriented toward a particular telos (Prov. 1.19, 31-32; 2.13-15; 4.14-17; 7.25-27). The path metaphor contributes to Proverbs’ conception of sin. It indicates that sin is not only a failure to seek wisdom and, by implication, to live in accordance with the moral order; sin is also the transgression of or failure to live within proper boundaries; it is the pursuit of an alternative moral order, and a lifestyle marked by the vices and desires of the foolish, the wicked and the evil. Among these issues, Proverbs’ discussion of desire and its relationship to sin may be the most significant. Desire plays a formative role in the discourse and pedagogy of Proverbs. For Proverbs, desire is not evil in itself (Prov. 4.5-9; 13.5; 29.27). But one’s desires must be trained in order to prevent them from longing for the wrong types of things. While the anthology has much to say about the distorted desires of sinners, the lazy and the wicked (Prov. 1.10-14; 4.16-17; 13.2; 21.10, 25), each of which leads to destructive ends, Proverbs 7 gives particular attention to the dangers of misplaced desire (Prov. 7.6-27). The poem invites the listener to gaze upon the strange woman’s provocative appearance (Prov. 7.10), to smell the aroma of her bedchamber, and to ingest her smooth words (Prov. 7.14-21). It creates a world of erotic desire through the appearance and seductive rhetoric of an unauthorized object of desire. In so doing, it illuminates the way in which desire for the wrong thing threatens to short-circuit one’s cognitive faculties, lead one down the wrong path, and entrap one in the snares of death (Prov. 7.22-27). Sinful desire not only shapes one’s character; it also shapes one’s decisions, actions, pursuits, orientation toward life and end. Together with receptivity, the pursuit of wisdom, and living within the proscribed boundaries of the moral order, desire plays a formative role in Proverbs’ conception of sin and moral selfhood. Proverbs bears witness to the 24

See Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, ‘Liminality and Worldview in Proverbs 1–9’, Semeia 50 (1990): 111.

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way in which sin rears its head through specific character types and within different social contexts. But it does much more than this. It conceptualizes sin through a distinctive framework. For Proverbs, sin is a refusal to accept discipline and receive instruction, a failure to pursue wisdom, a desire for pseudo-goods or unsanctioned objects, and a lifestyle that transgresses the boundaries of the moral order.

Sin and Job The various voices in the book of Job incorporate many of these convictions in their conceptualization of sin. Nonetheless, as a document that explores God’s governance of the world in general and the validity of disinterested righteousness in particular (Job 1.9), the book focuses on two specific matters in its vision of sin: the human condition and human limitations. Each deserves a brief comment. Similar to the Psalter and Proverbs, the book of Job presents a nuanced view of the moral self. In fact, the various voices within the Joban drama offer divergent evaluations of the human condition. As a paragon of piety, the prologue intimates that Job possesses the ‘moral equipment’ to choose what is right and act in accord with the divine will: he is blameless and upright, fearing God and turning away from evil (Job 1.1, 8; 2.3). The friends, however, offer a different assessment of the human condition. According to Eliphaz and Bildad, humans suffer from congenital sinfulness. In light of their birth, chthonic constitution, and position within the cosmic hierarchy, all humans are impure before God (Job 4.17-21; 15.14-16; 25.4-6); their moral imperfection is an inherent trait of creaturehood.25 In fact, all humans consume sin as if it were essential to their survival (15.16). While Job acknowledges that humans are woman-born and chthonic in nature, he does not draw the same conclusion as his comrades. For Job, the birth and constitution of humans suggests that they are mortal and ephemeral.26 In this respect, the human condition is not necessarily characterized by moral corruption; rather, according to Job, it is characterized by harsh servitude and an original charter of greatness that has 25

26

See Norman C. Habel, ‘“Naked I Came”: Humanness in the Book of Job’, in Die Botschaft und die Boten: Festschrift für Hans Walter Wolff zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. J. Jeremias and L. Perlitt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981), pp. 373–90. See Habel, ‘“Naked I Came”’, 389; G. L. Mattingly, ‘The Pious Sufferer: Mesopotamia’s Traditional Theodicy and Job’s Counselors’, in The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform Literature: Scripture in Context III (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990), p. 334.

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been nullified by the design of an indifferent, even violent deity (7.1-2, 17-18; 14.1–6).27 These divergent theological anthropologies illuminate one dimension of the different moral worldviews promoted by the parties in the debate.28 And the friends’ anthropodicy,29 combined with their a priori dependence upon and rigid application of the retribution principle, drives Job to deliver an oath of innocence in which he evaluates his moral status and condition (Job 31.1-40). This oath of innocence is profound, for it illuminates the internal dimensions of sin as well as the attitudes, actions and intentions that mark the moral life. The discourse incorporates the metaphor life is a path as well as a variety of somatic images (i.e. eyes, feet, heart, hands, mouth, bosom and steps) in order to illuminate Job’s firm control over his inner impulses and external actions.30 As an implicit power, Job intimates that sin has neither prevailed over his internal dispositions nor governed his behaviour. That is, sin has not directed his eyes, instigating temptation (Job 31.1), nor defiled his heart and hand (Job 31.7), nor persuaded his thoughts (Job 31.9), nor developed the desire to violate the rights of others (Job 31.13), nor bred injustice or inhumane treatment of others (Job 31.16-21), nor engendered avarice (Job 31.24-25), idolatry (Job 31.26-27), vengeance (Job 31.29-30), inhospitality (Job 31.32), hypocrisy (Job 31.33-34), or a breach of land rights (Job 31.38-39). Despite its power, Job has not permitted sin to pervert his attitudes, shape his desires, or promote an ethics of power that dehumanizes others. This stunning protestation of innocence moves well beyond the friends’ ‘iconic narratives’ concerning the individual, interpersonal and communal manifestations of sin and God’s response to such wickedness;31 it captures the way in which sin possesses the power to infect the heart and mind, distort the desires, violate others, destroy the community and shape one’s theological worldview. No wonder the oath has been designated as the highest standard of ethics prior to the Sermon on the Mount.32 The discourse describes Job’s exemplary moral status and condition. And in so doing, it highlights the nature, effects and extent of sins power over humanity. Habel, ‘Naked I Came’ pp. 381–90. See Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 90–168. 29 See Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Anchor, 1969), p. 74; James L. Crenshaw, ‘Introduction: The Shift from Theodicy to Anthropodicy’, in Theodicy in the Old Testament, ed. J. L. Crenshaw (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), pp. 1–16. 30 Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), p. 433. 31 For these narratives, see Newsom, The Book of Job, pp. 115–25. 32 A. Weiser, Das Buch Hiob (ATD; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), p. 214. 27

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This remarkable portrait of sin’s power and Job’s piety provides a backdrop against which to understand the document’s treatment of human limitations.33 Similar to Proverbs, the concept of limits or boundaries plays a formative role in the book’s conception of sin and the human condition. Within the dialogue proper, the friends give particular attention to divine inscrutability in an attempt to move Job to recognize his intellectual limitations and to reintegrate him within their moral world (Job 11.7-9; 15.7-8; cf. 36.26-29; 37.5). The wisdom hymn indicates that, despite their power and ingenuity, humans are unable to find wisdom, for their capacities are limited (Job 28.1-28). And the barrage of rhetorical questions as well as the wild and wondrous world projected in the divine speeches help Job to recognize this reality: his wisdom and power are limited (Job 38.1-41.34).34 Job acknowledges these limits in his climactic confession (Job 42.2-6); he concedes that he overreached or transgressed particular intellectual boundaries: he declared things he did not understand, things too wonderful, which he did not know (Job 42.3). This acknowledgement of creatureliness and the limitations inherent in human nature shapes the document’s conception of the human condition and the nature of sin.35 In the light of human finitude, the book of Job conceptualizes sin as a transgression of appropriate boundaries, as the failure of humans to accept and embrace their place within the created order and in relationship with God.36

Sin and Ecclesiastes The same is true of the book of Ecclesiastes. Qohelet’s recognition of fundamental frustration in every human endeavour is inextricably linked to his anthropology in general and his conception of human limitations in particular.37 Qohelet 33

34

35

36 37

For an excellent discussion of limits within the wisdom tradition, see Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, trans. J. D. Martin (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1972), pp. 97–110. This does not mean that Job fails to acknowledge certain limits. In fact, the discourses suggest Job recognizes the problem of divine–human alterity. To overcome this alterity, Job employs a legal metaphor to summon God to court and create an even playing field (e.g. 9.33; 16.19; 19.25; 13.15-19; 27.1-6; 31.35-37). For discussion of the legal metaphor, see Habel, The Book of Job, pp. 54–7; F. Rachel Magdalene, On the Scales of Righteousness: Neo-Babylonian Trial Law and the Book of Job (BJS 348; Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2007). See Samuel E. Balentine, ‘Inside the “Sanctuary of Silence”: The Moral-Ethical Demands of Suffering’, in Character Ethics and the Old Testament: Moral Dimensions of Scripture, ed. M. Daniel Carroll R. and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (Lousiville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), p. 70. Biddle, Missing the Mark, p. 45. See Stephan de Jong, ‘God in the Book of Qohelet: A Reappraisal of Qohelet’s Place in Old Testament Theology’, VT 47 (1997): 154–67; Mark R. Sneed, The Politics of Pessimism in Ecclesiastes: A Social-Science Perspective (SBL Ancient Israel and Its Literature; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), p. 162.

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observes that human memory is shortsighted and faulty (Eccl. 1.9-11; 6.10). Human activity is transient (Eccl. 2.18-19). Human life is ephemeral (Ecc 1.4; 7.15); all humans are frail and wicked (Eccl. 3.18; 7.20, 29). Human power and planning are deficient (Eccl. 3.14; 8.8; 9.11-12); human wisdom is finite (Eccl. 7.14, 23-24; 8.17; 11.5); and the human appetite is insatiable (Eccl. 4.8; 5.10; 6.7). Together with his reflections on human finitude and limitations, Qohelet observes that the world in which humans live is broken. The weak are crushed by the powerful (Eccl. 4:1; 5.8; 8.9); the oppressed live without a comforter (Eccl. 4.1); the worker is left with neither colleague nor companion (Eccl. 4.7-8); and the wise ruler governs without faithful followers (Eccl. 4.13-16). The wicked are a walking advertisement for evil (Eccl. 8.11). And the social as well as the economic structures within the world are unjust and oppressive (Eccl. 3.16; 4.13-16; 5.8-9; 8.9).38 In view of these observations, it is not surprising that Qohelet restricts the verdict hebel to human activities and aspirations. Qohelet accentuates the severe limitations inherent within and placed upon humans. These limitations, combined with the consequences associated with beingsituated in a crooked world, shape Qohelet’s conception of sin. While Qohelet describes the nature and effects of sin through conventional character types (Eccl. 2.14; 8.13; 9.18), particular attitudes (Eccl. 4.4; 7.9), as well as matters of social injustice and divine retribution (Eccl. 3.16–17; 5.8; 8.9, 14; 11.9), in general, his anthropology serves as the window into his theological conception of sin. For Qohelet, humans are perverse, limited creatures. The problem is that humans refuse to acknowledge their creatureliness and live within their limits. Put differently, humans fail to accept their lot and embrace life’s limited possibilities within God’s inscrutable design.39 They overreach; they transgress the boundaries appropriate to creaturehood.40 They place inappropriate expectations on the profit of human activities. They invest in things that cannot yield the supposed gain. They consume things that are not built to bring definitive satisfaction. In a word, by failing to recognize, embrace, and live within their limits as well as the limits inherent in human activities, humans sin. This conception of sin is not at odds with Proverbs and Job. Ecclesiastes, however, gives particular attention to the nature and limits of human beings and human activities in a broken world. In so doing, the document seeks to recalibrate the expectations of humans See Frydrych, Living Under the Sun, pp. 163–4. See Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and A Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999; repr. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2010), p. 11. 40 Biddle, Missing the Mark, p. 33. 38 39

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by identifying the boundaries of human ability and the space within which humans should live.41

A Summary of Sin in the Writings As an eclectic collection of documents, the Writings provide a multifaceted portrait of sin’s many faces. This brief discussion of sin’s profile in the Psalter as well as the wisdom literature represents only the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless, this tip offers a point of reference from which to explore the variegated nature and effects of sin in the final section of the Hebrew canon. The covenantal and cultic cast of the Psalter, coupled with its use of certain conceptual metaphors, creates a framework within which to understand the character and extensive effects of sin in Lamentations as well as portions of Ruth, Daniel, Ezra– Nehemiah and Chronicles. And Proverbs’ discourse on the nature of desire contributes to an understanding of the way in which the Song of Songs reflects on the power and proclivities of desire (Song 2.7; 3.5; 8.4, 6-7). Sin’s presence, whether implicit or explicit, pervades the Writings. It is a power that is difficult to domesticate; and it is a concept that is difficult to define. Despite this difficulty, the Psalter and the constituent documents in the wisdom tradition focus on particular concepts that contribute to an understanding of sin. As an embodied phenomenon that affects every dimension of human existence, the Psalter tends to conceptualize sin as a sickness, a power, a weight, a stain, rebellion and amnesia. While the wisdom tradition employs some of these concepts, its vision of sin is governed by humanity’s failure to seek wisdom, to recognize and embrace appropriate limits as well as to desire the right sorts of things. In this respect, sin is not only overreaching or overstepping appropriate boundaries; it is also underachieving, falling short of those boundaries.42 In each case, sin is, in the most general terms, a failure to be authentically human, to treat others as fully human, and to accept one’s place in the divine economy.43

Sneed, The Politics of Pessimism, pp. 162, 240–52. See Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 5. 43 See Biddle, Missing the Mark, pp. xii–xiii. 41

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Synoptic Gospels C. Clifton Black

The Vocabulary of Sin in the Synoptics We begin our study with those terms in Matthew, Mark and Luke that most frequently connote sinful conduct. Seven such words, plus cognates, are commonplace.1 A. By far the most common verbal root is hamart-, whose fundamental meanings in classical and koine Greek are to ‘miss the mark’, ‘err’, ‘be at fault’, or ‘fail’.2 Some declension of this term appears sixty times in the first three Gospels (Matthew, fifteen times; Mark, thirteen times; Luke, thirty-two times). 1. hamartanō, ‘to commit a wrong’ (seven times): ‘Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him’ (Lk. 17.3 RSV);3 2. hamartēma, a ‘transgression’, whether slight or serious (twice): ‘Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter’ (Mk 3.28); 3. hamartia, ‘deviation from a right standard’ (twenty-four times): ‘and [the Jerusalemites and Judeans] were baptized by [John] in the river Jordan, confessing their sins’ (Mt. 3.6);4 4. hamartalōs, ‘one exhibiting conduct in disaccord with standard moral 1

2

3 4

Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical translations adopt the NRSV. ‘A.T.’ designates this author’s translation. See Gottfried Quell, Georg Betram, Gustav Stählin and Walter Grundmann, ‘hamartanō, hamartēma, hamartia’, in Gerhard Kittel (ed.) and Geoffrey W. Bromiley (trans. and ed.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), pp. 267–316. This semantic cluster usually translates the Hebrew terms chaṭṭā’ṭ (‘miss the mark’) and ‘awōn (‘iniquity’) in the LXX. See also Mt. 18.15, 21b; 27.4; Lk. 15.18, 21; 17.4. In addition: Mt. 1.21; 9.2, 5, 6; 12.31; 26.28; Mk. 1.4, 5; 2.5, 7, 9, 10; Lk. 1.77; 3.3; 5.20, 21, 23, 24; 7.47, 48, 49; 11.4; 24.47.

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expectations’, ‘the irreligious’ (twenty-seven times): ‘I have come to call not the righteous but sinners’ (Mk 2.17b).5 B. The second most common expression for sin in the Synoptics derives from the root ponēr-: ‘a bad or grievous condition’, ‘useless’, ‘worthless’, ‘base’, or ‘knavish’.6 Some form of ponēr- occurs forty times (Matt, twenty-five times; MK three times; Lk, twelve times). 1. ponēria, something ‘wicked’, ‘base’, or ‘malicious’ (three times): ‘Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness’ (LK. 11.39; cf. MT. 22.18; MK 7.22); 2. ponēros, that which is ‘wicked’, ‘evil’, ‘worthless’, ‘degenerate’, or ‘vicious’ (36 times): ‘for [God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous’ (Mt. 5.45b).7 C. Seventeen times Matthew and Luke refer or allude to sin with some form of the root opheil-: what is ‘owed’, ‘due’, or ‘indebted’: 1. A debtor, opheiletēs: ‘as we also have forgiven our debtors’ (Mt. 6.12; cf. 18.24; Lk. 7.41 [twice]; 13.4; 16.5 [twice]); 2. An obligation, opheilē: ‘I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me’ (Mt. 18.32); 3. To be in debt, opheilō: ‘for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us’ (Lk. 11.4b; cf. 16.7; 17:10; Mt. 18.28 [twice], 30, 34; 23.16, 18). D. Ten times Matthew and Luke present one of three forms of the root adik-, that which is ‘un-ruled’ or ‘disordered’: 1. adikeō, ‘to wrong’, ‘cheat’, ‘mistreat’, or ‘injure’: ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong’ (Mt. 20.13; cf. Lk. 10.19); 2. adikia, that which ‘violates a right standard of conduct’, ‘injustice’, ‘wrongdoing’, ‘unrighteousness’, ‘wickedness’: ‘Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity’ (Lk. 13.27 RSV; cf. 16.8, 9; 18.6); 3. adikos, ‘contrary to what is right’, ‘unjust’, ‘crooked’: ‘The Pharisee … was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves,

5

6

7

Also Mt. 9.10, 11, 13; 11.19; 26.45; Mk 2.15, 16; 8.38; 14.41; Lk. 5.8, 30, 32; 6.32, 33, 34; 7.34, 37, 39; 13.2; 15:1, 7, 10; 18.13; 19.7; 24.7. The LXX uses these term to translate forms of the Hebrew rāshā‘ (‘bad’, ‘evil’). See Günther Harder, ‘ponēros, ponēria’, TDNT 6 (1968), pp. 546–66. So, too, Mt. 5.11, 37, 39; 6.13, 23; 7.11, 17, 18; 9.4; 12.34, 35, 39, 45; 13:19, 38, 49; 15.19: 16.4; 18.32; 20.15; 22.10; 25.26; Mk 7.22, 23; Lk. 3.19; 6.22, 35, 45; 7.21; 8.1b-2a; 11.13, 26, 29, 34; 19.22.



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rogues [adikoi], adulterers, or even like this tax collector”’ (Lk. 18.11; cf. 16.10, 11; Mt. 5.45). E. Fewer than ten times the Synoptics employ each of these correlative terms: 1. Anomia, a lawless disposition: ‘So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness’ (Mt. 23.28; cf. 7.23; 13.41; 24.12; Lk. 22.37); 2. Paraptōma, a ‘violation of moral standards’, ‘offence’, or ‘wrongdoing’ (from a Greek root whose etymology is a ‘false step’ or ‘blunder’): ‘For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you’ (Mt. 6.14; cf. 6:15; Mk 11.25); 3. Kakia, ‘wickedness’, ‘depravity’, or ‘vice’: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof ’ (Mt. 6.34 KJV). Some preliminary observations are in order. (a) While forms of hamartia are the terms for sin most often adopted in all three Synoptics, Luke uses them more than twice as much as either Matthew or Mark. (b) Conversely, Matthew favours ponēros and ponēria, which appear therein twice as often than in Luke and over twelve times more often than in Mark. (c) Even though ‘righteousness’ is a key Matthean term (3.15; 5.6, 10, 20, 6.33; 21.32), its verbal negation (adik-) occurs four times more often in Luke. Matthew is more partial to anomia, that which transgresses law or commandment (cf. 5.17-19). (d) Sin’s description as ‘indebtedness’ is comparatively rare in the Synoptics – surprisingly so in Luke, whose dominant metaphor for salvation is forgiveness (1.77; 3.3; 5.20, 21, 23, 24; 6.37; 7.47, 48; 11.4; 12.10; 17.3, 4; 23.34; 24.47). (e) Of all the Synoptics Mark speaks least about sin: explicitly, only seventeen times. (f) It is surprising how little the Synoptic Gospels, taken altogether, refer to sin by one or another of these terms: from this inventory, only 136 times. To be sure, the seven semantic fields considered here do not exhaust all possibilities (cf. skandalizō, ‘to stumble’: Mt. 18.6-9/Mk. 9.42-47/Lk. 17.1-2). Moreover, the Evangelists can advert to disobedience (Mt. 3.7-10/Lk. 3.7-9; Mt. 4.1-11/Lk. 4.1-13) without using these terms. Nevertheless, the Synoptics comprise about 36 per cent of the NT; that they should explicitly address the subject of sin so infrequently is interesting. When one remembers the high degree of material overlapping the Synoptics (e.g. Mt. 3.1-6/Mk 1.1-6/Lk. 3.1-6; Mt. 9.1-8/Mk 2.1-12/Lk. 5.17-26), the percentage of fresh, focused attention to sin is further reduced. The Synoptic Gospels neither neglect nor belabour the topic. (g) The sample quotations, presented above, demonstrate that ‘sin’ is relegated to no single group or class. Sin is a universal

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human condition, besetting Jesus’ disciples, adversaries, and the populace at large.

Patterns of Thought about Sin in the Synoptics In many ways Jesus’ teaching about sin in the Synoptics deviates from or deemphasizes important aspects of its presentation in the OT. He never castigates idolatry, Israel’s worship of false gods (cf. 1 Sam. 15.23; 2 Chron. 33.7; Isa. 40.19; Jer. 18.15; Ezek. 23.49; Hos. 10.6). Unlike the prophets, Jesus never accuses Israel of violating its covenant with the Lord God (Isa. 24.5; Jer. 11:10; 22.9; Ezek. 17.18-19; Hos. 8.1; Mal. 2.5-10 cf. Ps. 78.10, 37). Luke (3.28) notes Adam among Jesus’ ancestry, but Adam’s primordial sin (Gen. 3.1-21) is never mentioned (cf. Rom. 5.14; 1 Cor. 15.22). No differentiation is suggested between inadvertent and willful sins (cf. Lev. 4-5; Num. 15). Jesus neither accuses his listeners of forsaking God (Deut. 31.16; 2 Chron. 7.19; Ps. 119.53; Isa. 1.28; Jn 2.8) nor warns them away from defiant rebellion against the Almighty (cf. Exod. 23.21; Josh. 22.18-19; 1 Sam. 12.14-15; Isa. 1.20; Jer. 28.16; 48.8; Hos. 7.14). Nowhere in Jesus’ teaching is there anything like the harrowing diagnosis of Israel’s recurring sin in Psalm 106.6-47. The nearest intersections between Jesus’ allusions and OT metaphors lie in his address of his generation as ‘adulterous’ or unfaithful (Mt. 12.39; 16.4; Mk 8.38; cf. Exod. 34.15-16; Isa. 1:21; Ezek. 16.32; Hos. 4.10-15), and his cautions against causing others to ‘stumble’ (Mt. 18.1-10; Mk 9.42–50/Lk. 17.1–4; cf. Prov. 4.19; Jer. 18.15; Mal. 2:8). As Elijah redivivus (Mk 6.14-29; cf. 1 Kgs 18-21), blasting Israel’s arrogance and summoning its repentance (Mt. 3.1-10; Lk. 3.3-14), John the Baptist is more obviously reminiscent of the OT prophets than is Jesus (Mt. 16.13-16/Mk 8.27-29/Lk. 9.18-20).8 In all strata of the Synoptic tradition – Mark, Q (the sayings-source hypothetically underlying Matthew and Luke), sources unique to Matthew (M) and to Luke (L) – the centre of Jesus’ proclamation is hē basileia tou theou: ‘God’s kingdom, reign, sovereign governance’. Intertestamental Judaism offers glimmers of this metaphor, associated with the coming of a messiah (‘anointed delegate’) who would annihilate lawless Gentiles and unite Israel in righteousness (Pss. Sol. 17.1-32). In Jesus’ preaching, the kingdom is not coterminous 8

To this rule there is the occasional exception: thus, the Elisha tradition in 2 Kgs 4.42-44 has coloured Mt. 14.15-21/Mk 6.40-44/Lk. 9.12-17.



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with Israel or any geopolitical entity; neither is it styled as inner spirituality or a utopian dream. Instead, the kingdom is a metaphor for God’s dynamic sovereignty throughout eternity (Mt. 13.36-43), already yet secretly erupting in human history (Mt. 13.18-23; Mk 4.22): on the verge (Mk 1.15; 9.1), already present (Lk. 6.20; 17.20-21), and yet to be consummated (Mt. 13.24-30; Lk. 13.29). A gift from God, not a human achievement (Mk 10.23-27; Lk. 12.32), the kingdom overturns conventional expectations (Mt. 20.1-16; Lk. 6.20; 9.59-60). It requires radical acceptance (Mt.18.23–35; Lk. 9.60) and infant dependence (Mk 10.14-15; Lk. 18.16-17). Those with faith anticipate its surprising future with joy and wonder (Lk.14.7-24); the faithless are hardened in their rejection (Mk 4.11-12, 25). The kingdom’s coming is entwined with Jesus’ routing of satanic powers: ‘But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you’ (Lk. 11.20; cf. Mt. 12.28). In the Synoptics where Jesus is, there is God’s kingdom. Still, Jesus resists the centre of attention: he points away from himself, toward the gospel’s concrete manifestations in the reclamation of Israel’s victimized, poor and hopeless (Mt. 11.2-6; Lk. 7.18-23). The kingdom of God is the architecture within which the Synoptics understand sin and its defeat. At the Lord God’s bequest, ‘[Jesus] will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end’ (Lk. 1.33). ‘[Mary] will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins’ (Mt. 1.21; cf. Lk. 1.76-77).9 Broadly construed, God’s kingdom, instantiated by Jesus, is God’s merciful power to rectify a corrupted creation, to put in right relationship with God all that has been fractured and divorced from its Creator. Although Torah is synchronous with the kingdom’s demands (Mt. 22.35-40; Lk. 16.17), the kingdom, as interpreted by Jesus, also explodes some commandments (Mt. 5.38-39, 43-44) or drives more deeply to the heart of their intent (Mk 10.2-12). In the Synoptics ‘the kingdom of God’ occupies the centrality of ‘covenant’ in the OT’s prophetic and Deuteronomic traditions. For that reason the dynamic of human response is reoriented: instead of looking backward toward Mount Horeb, repenting of failure or refusal to maintain covenant fidelity, the believer is called by Jesus to live forward into God’s new, invasive claim upon a creation whose divine reclamation is in progress. ‘The law and the prophets were in effect until John came; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and everyone is pressed to enter it’ (Lk. 16.16 [A.T.]).10 In simple terms, the prophets and John preached: 9

10

‘Jesus’ (Greek: ’Iēsous) renders the Hebrew name ‘Joshua’ (Yēshûa‘), cognate with the verb ‘to save’ (ysh‘) and the noun ‘salvation’ (yēshû‘â). The final verb in this clause, biazetai, may be translated in the middle or passive voice: respectively,

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Repent of your sins, and God will save you. Jesus affirmed God’s preexisting mercy, prior to repentance, as the motive power for living in accordance with God’s righteous kingdom: ‘Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more’ (Jn 8.11 KJV).11 Luke 19.1-10 presents the dynamics of sin and salvation present in all the Synoptics. He entered Jericho and was passing through it. 2A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. 3He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. 4So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. 5When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’ 6So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. 7All who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.’ 8 Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.’ 9Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. 10For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.’ 1

Luke’s slender descriptions of Zacchaeus are significant. First: he is a ‘chief tax [or ‘toll’] collector’ (architelōnēs). Characteristically – and uniquely – in the Synoptics, ‘tax collectors’ are coupled with ‘sinners’ (‘am hā’ārets: the unrepentant wicked: Mk 2.14-17/Mt. 9.10-13/Lk. 5.29-32; Mt. 11.17/Lk. 7.34; Lk. 15.1-2). Alternatively, ‘tax collectors’ are conjoined with ‘Gentiles’ (Mt. 5.46-47/Lk. 6.32–34; Mt. 18.17), ‘Gentile sinner’ being a commonplace slur for the nations disobedient to Torah (Man. 8; Jub. 23.24; Gal. 2.15). Yet another variation: telōnai kai pornai, ‘tax collectors and prostitutes’ (Mt. 21.31-32). In Luke 3.12 and 7.29 tax collectors are fit subjects for John’s baptism; in Luke 18.9-14 a miserable tax collector is contrasted with a smug Pharisee. Exactly why telōnai are singled out for invective is not clear from the primary sources. According to Josephus, roughly contemporaneous with the Gospels, it may be because Jews hired by Roman overlords to collect oppressive taxes from their fellows were regarded as traitors: ‘Jews who made themselves Gentiles’ (Ant. 17.204, 307). Centuries

11

‘everyone is pressing into it’ or ‘everyone is strongly urged into it’. The latter may be preferable – neither need connote violence (cf. Mt. 11.12); see also Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (x–xxiv) (AB 28A; Garden City: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 1117–18. Although this is the punch line of a story found in John (7.53–8.11), that pericope appears to have been interpolated into the Fourth Gospel. In any case it is more like the Synoptic controversy narratives than anything else in John (cf. Mt. 22.15-40/Mk 12.13-34/Lk. 10.25-28; 20.20-40).



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later, in the Babylonian Talmud, ‘tax collectors’ are generally suspect of thievery and extortion (b. Sanh. 25b; b. Bek. 31a).12 Whatever Luke’s precise intent, he concurs with Matthew and Mark in presenting tax collectors as despicable types. Zacchaeus appears even worse: he is a chief or managerial (archi-) tax collector (cf. the archisynagōgoi, ‘synagogue rulers’, in Lk. 8.49; 13.14). There is another strike against Zacchaeus: he is ‘rich’ (plousios). In the Synoptics wealth in itself is not indicative of sinful practice (cf. Mt. 27.57; Mk 12.41/Lk. 21.1). The primary difficulty posed by possessions is the temptation to rely on them instead of God’s gracious provision (Mt. 19.16-30/Mk 10.17-31/Lk. 18.18-30; cf. Mt. 6.25-34/Lk. 12.22-31). Among the Synoptics Luke is notably sensitive to the dangers of wealth, a transient good that competes with God for human affection and utter reliance: ‘No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth’ (Lk. 16.13/Mt. 6.24; cf. Lk. 12.1621). As temptations to covetousness, riches also corrupt human relationships: the wealthy can become indifferent to their needy neighbours (Lk. 14.12-24; 16.19-31), oblivious to the Lord who ‘has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty’ (Lk.1.53; cf. 6.24). Zacchaeus acts contrary to expectation: like the blind beggar of the tale immediately preceding (Lk. 18.3543), he exerts extraordinary effort to see Jesus (Lk. 19.3-4). Zacchaeus’ aggressive action and downward gaze is matched by Jesus’ progress and upward acknowledgement: ‘Hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today’ (Lk. 19.5). The honour of Jesus’ presence is bestowed today (sēmeron; cf. Lk. 4.21; 5.26; 13.32-33; 23.43) in response to genuine outreach but in advance of any good work (cf. Lk. 4.18; 5.38-39, 42-44; 5:1-11, 12-16, 17-26; 6.6-11; 18.15-17, 35-43). In Jesus the hospitality of God must be (dei) freely extended to the unsavoury without expectation of reciprocity (cf. Lk. 5.27-32; 14.1-24; 15.1-; Mt. 5.43-48/Lk. 6.32–36; Mt. 8.5-13/Lk. 7.1-10).13 Zacchaeus, however, does reciprocate, triggering a series of swift, revealing exchanges. (a) Having shinnied down from his sycamore perch, he welcomes Jesus ‘joyfully’ (chairōn, Lk. 19.6): precisely the response to Jesus’ coming that Luke’s Gospel repeatedly stresses (Lk. 1.14, 44; 2.10; 10.17; 15.10; 24.41; see also Mt. 2.10; 13.44; 25.21, 23; 28.8). (b) The tax collector’s joy evokes a

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John R. Donahue, ‘Tax Collectors and Sinners: An Attempt at Identification’, CBQ 33 (1971):39–61. Halvor Moxnes, The Economy of the Kingdom: Social Conflict and Economic Relations in Luke’s Gospel (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), pp. 127–38. Jesus’ offer to stay with Zacchaeus resembles promises of Israel’s future vindication at a banquet hosted by the Lord (Isa. 25.6; Ezek. 39.17-20; 1 En. 62.14; Mt. 22.1-10/Lk. 14.12-24).

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joyless reaction: ‘All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner”’ (Lk. 19.7). Already that criticism has been levelled against Jesus: ‘And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them”’ (Lk. 15.2; see also Mt. 9.10-11/Mk 2.15-17/Lk. 5.29-30). In the biblical tradition ‘grumbling’ (Heb.: lun; Greek: diagonguzō) is associated with those who err (Isa. 29.24), those spiteful of divine grace (Deut. 1.27; Ps. 106.24-25; Mt. 20.11), the jealous, the slanderous and the wicked (Wis. 1.10–11; Sir. 46.7; Jas 5.9). In Lk. 19:7 this conduct is generalized beyond Pharisees and scribes: here it is the response of all witnesses – suggesting the degree of infamy in which this chief tax collector was held. (c) Disregarding their insult, Zacchaeus volunteers an astonishing donation to the poor14 – in Luke, the peculiar recipients of Jesus’ good news (1.52-53; 4.18; 6.20; 7.22; 14., 21; 16.20; 18.22) – and promises fourfold restitution of anything he has extorted (19.8). Only the widow in the temple treasury gives up more than Zacchaeus: ‘for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on’ (Lk. 21.). (d) Replying to Zacchaeus, Jesus is given the last word: not congratulations on a job well done; instead, assurance of salvation to a wayward son of Abraham, the ‘patron saint’ of Israelite hospitality (Lk. 19.9; cf. 15.24, 32; Gen. 18.1-8). The story ends on a Christological point: the reason for the Son of man’s coming is, not to destroy, but rather a mission of search-and-save (Lk. 19.10).15 The legend of Zacchaeus exemplifies Jesus’ climactic beatitude and woe in his Sermon on the Plain (Lk. 6.22-24): Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. 24But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 22

Zacchaeus escapes catastrophe: in gratitude for Jesus’ favour, he’s a camel who 14

15

Conjugated in the simple present tense, the verb didōmai may be interpreted as a customary practice or as a statement of intent ‘from this time forward’ (Fitzmyer, Luke (x–xxiv), p. 1225). Among the many actions associated with ‘the Son of man’ in Jewish apocalypticism is heavenly judgement of the wicked (1 En. 38.2; 46.1; 47.3; 48.10; 52.4; 69.27-29; 4 Ezra 7.28-29; 11.1-12.32). That nuance persists in the Synoptic traditions, especially Q, M, and L (Mt. 13.41-42; 24.37-44/ Lk. 17.26-27; Mt. 16.27; Mt. 25.31-33; Lk. 9:26; 11.30; 12.8–9; 17.28–30). More pervasive, however, are sayings about the Son of man’s (= Jesus’) own condemnation and suffering (Mt. 8.20/Lk. 9.58; Mt. 12.40; Mt. 16.13, 21/Mk 8.31; Lk. 9.22; Mt. 17.12/Mk 9.12; Mt. 17.22; Mk. 9.31/Lk. 9:44; Mt. 20.18/Mk 10.33–4/ Lk. 18.31-3; Mt. 26.2, 45/Mark 14.41; Lk. 24:7) for the sake of saving others, within and beyond Israel (Mt. 9.6/Mk 2.10/Lk. 5.24; Mt. 20.28/Mk 10.45). In Mark the Son of man’s redemptive suffering and death are most pronounced.



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can release the drag of wealth into the hands of the needy who cannot reciprocate, thereby squeezing through the needle’s eye and securing ‘eternal life’, the only reward that matters (Lk. 18.18-30; cf. 12.33-34). His and Jesus’ defamation by others (‘a sinner’ and ‘a sinner’s guest’) carries no significance whatever; they are transmogrified by the countercultural mores of God’s kingdom: ‘Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy [chara] in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance’ (15.7). Accordingly Jesus refuses to measure repentance by predictable religious norms: he never restricts righteousness to his own disciples (Mark 12.28-34/ Lk. 10.25-28), nor does he accuse of sin those who refuse to follow him (Mt. 19.16-22/Lk. 10.17-22/Lk. 18.18-25).16 In the Synoptics sin’s deepest infestation is among the self-righteous: they do not avail themselves of God’s mercy because they cannot recognize in themselves the failure (hamartia) and indebtedness (opheilē), the malice (ponēria) and transgression (paraptōma), which they readily ascribe to others. ‘You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God’ (Lk.16.15). Exemplary of this conduct is the merciless slave in Matthew 18.23-35: forgiven by his king of an impossibly un-payable debt, he jails a peer who owes him 00.0001per cent less.17 The Synoptics teem with ‘blind guides’ (Mt. 15.14; 23.16, 24; cf. Lk. 6.39) of many different kinds: MM

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19

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Pharisees and Sadducees – the popularly pious and the priestly aristocracy18 – who presume on their ethnic privilege (Mt. 3.7-10/Lk. 3.7–9; Mt. 8.10-12; Lk. 4.25-30; 16.22-31)19 or scriptural insight (Mt. 12.1-15/Mk 2.23-3.6/Lk. 6.1-11; Mt. 22:23-33/Mk 12:18-27/Lk. 20.27-40; Matt 23:1-36/Mk 12:38-40/ Lk. 11.37-44; 20.45-47), or are simply threatened by the Messiah they refuse to recognize (Mt. 21.33-46/Mk 12.1-12/Lk. 20.9–19; Mt. 26.59-68/Mk 14.55-65/Lk. 22.66-71); scribes or ‘teachers of the law’20 who see in Jesus’ healing only blasphemy (Mt. 9.1-/Mk 2.12/Lk. 5.1-26); Contrast the preaching of Peter and Paul in Acts 2.38; 3.19; 5.31; 10.43; 13.38; 22.16; 26.18. Similarly, Mt. 24.45-51 warns against abuse of power among fellow slaves in the household of God. For a clear historical overview, consult E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 bce–66 ce (London and Philadelphia: SCM/Trinity Press International, 1992), pp. 315–40, 380–451. In view of Lk. 3.8, Jesus’ reassertion of Zacchaeus as ‘a son of Abraham’ (19.9) acquires another dimension: God is able to raise up even a quisling – Caesar’s collaborator – to the status of Abraham’s child. The attitudes described here are by no means confined to Jesus’ adversaries. In Lk. 9.51-56 the disciples James and John are upbraided for furious prejudice against Samaritans; in 17.7-10 they are warned away from presuming upon apostolic entitlement. On the sopherîm or grammateis in ancient Jewish society, see Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes

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hypocrites who parade their religiosity or superior discernment of sin (Mt. 6.16-; 7.1-/Lk. 6:41-42; Mt. 23.27-36); ‘false prophets’ in sheep’s clothing (Mt. 7.15; cf. 24.11, 24/Mk 13.22; Lk. 6.26); miracle-mongers who flout or despise God’s will (Mt. 7.21-/Lk. 6.46; Mt. 27.40-44/Mk 15.29-32/Lk. 23.35-38); the faithless who demand of Jesus miraculous credentials (Mt. 12.38-42/Mk 8.11-13/Lk. 11.29-32; Mt. 16.1-4); persecutory potentates and traitorous kindred (Mt. 10.16-23/Mk 13.9-13/ Lk. 21.12–19; Mt. 27.3–26/Mk 15.1-15/Lk. 23.1-5); Jewish cities less repentant than their pagan neighbours (Mt. 11.20-24/Lk. 10.13-15); craven disciples who are irresponsible stewards (Mt. 25.14-30/Lk. 19.11-27; cf. Mk 4.24-25; Lk. 16.1-8) or outright cowards (Mt. 26.69-75/Mk 14.66-72/ Lk. 22.54b-62); heartless disciples, blind to Jesus in their needy neighbours (Mt. 25.31-36).

God’s hospitality is extended to all, pious Simon (Lk. 7.36-50) and sinful Zacchaeus alike (19.1-10). Yet sinners who recognize themselves as such possess a curious advantage: the Christ of the Synoptics fraternizes with sinners and welcomes them into the kingdom. Simon Peter … fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’… Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ (Lk. 5.8, 10) When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’ (Mt. 9.11-13/Mk 2.16-17/Lk. 5:29-32) But the tax collector, standing far off [from the Pharisee in the temple] would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted. (Lk. 18.13-14) Jesus said to [the chief priests and the elders of the people], ‘Truly I tell you, the and Sadducees in Palestinian Society: A Sociological Approach (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988), pp. 241–76.



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tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.’ (Mt. 21.31b)

No pattern pertaining to sin and salvation is more recurrent in the Synoptics than this, discernible in every stratum of their constitutive traditions. Very likely this welcome of those considered flagrantly wicked is traceable to Jesus himself; it is intelligible as a genuine bone of contention between himself and his more conventionally pious Jewish contemporaries.21 For those in the first or twenty-first century, conditioned by Scripture to separate themselves from contamination by the wicked until they have mended their ways (Num. 16.26; 1 Sam. 2.9; 2 Chron. 7.14; Ps. 119.155; Prov. 15.29; Isa. 26.10: Ezek. 33.8; 1 Cor 5.13; 2 Tim. 3.13, among hundreds of examples), Jesus’ attitude and actions remain scandalous.

Some Perennial Issues While their comprehensive examination is impossible here, a number of interpretative problems bearing on sin and salvation in the Synoptics invite notation.

Is sin a power in the synoptics? Although sin’s personification as an insidious tyrant is commonly associated with Paul (Rom. 3.9; 5.12-21; 6.1-23; 7.7-25; Gal. 3.22), it is arguably as old as Genesis (4.7): ‘And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it’ (cf. Wis. 1.4; 10.13; Sir. 21.2; 27.10; 1QH 1.27; 4.29-30). The Synoptics tend not to personify sin’s power in this manner. Some references are made to the evil that corrupts humanity’s moral compass without specifying its origin: ‘For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come’ (Mk 7.21/Mt. 15.19); ‘If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!’ (Mt. 7.11/Lk. 11.13; see also Mt. 5.45; 9.4; 12:34-35/Lk. 6.45; Mt. 13.49). More commonly, sin’s nefarious power in the Synoptics is attributed to the devil, ‘the evil one’ (Mt.5.37; 6.13; 13.19, 38-39), or to his minions (Mt. 12:45/Lk. 11.26: Mt. 25.41; Lk. 7.21; 8.2), who tempt the righteous, including Jesus himself (Mt. 4:1-11/Lk. 4.1-13), or pervert God’s good 21

For well-reasoned analysis, see E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 174–211.

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intentions for the world (Mt. 13.19/Lk. 8.12). Especially in traditions available to Matthew (M), a contest between ‘the children of the kingdom’ of the Son of man and ‘the children of the evil one’ is imagined (Mt. 13.24-30, 36-43) but left undeveloped in the Synoptics.22 Therein Jesus does not ‘cast out sin’; rather, he casts out demons or unclean spirits that, in Jewish apocalypticism, traffic in sin (Mk 1.21-28/Lk. 4.31-37; Mk 5.1-20/Mt. 8.28-9.1/Lk. 8.26-39; Mk 7.24-30/Mt. 15.22–28; Mk 9.14-29/Mt. 17.14-18/Lk. 9.37-43a; Mt. 9.32-33/Lk. 11.14).

Sin, sickness and calamity Especially in Deuteronomic theology, the suffering of particular diseases is attributed to the Lord God as retribution for Israel’s disobedience of the covenant (Deut. 28.15-68; cf. 1 Sam. 16.14-23; 1 Kgs 8.3-53; 14.1-16; 2 Chron. 21.11-15; Ps. 107.17-18; Amos 1.3–3.2). Focusing that point of view upon the individual sufferer (2.1-8; 22.5-11; 34.5-9), the Book of Job challenges its theological adequacy. Although apocalyptically inflected books like Daniel (3.1-0; 6.1-8; 11.1-12.13) and Tobit (2:1-14; 3:8; 6.1-17) associate the suffering of the righteous with demonic forces, it is fair to say that the linkage of healing with repentance from sin pulses throughout much of the Jewish Bible: [At Marah] the Lord made for [Israel] a statute and an ordinance and there he put them to the test. He said, ‘If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in his sight, and give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you.’ (Exod. 15.25b-26) My child, when you are ill, do not delay, but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you. Give up your faults and direct your hands rightly, and cleanse your heart from all sin. (Sir. 38.9-10)

In the Synoptic Gospels catastrophic effects are attenuated from the cause of sin: At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. [Jesus] asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam 22

Cf. the Dead Sea Scrolls: 1QS 1.9-10; 4Q177 13.7-11; 4Q548 2.9-16.



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fell on them – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’ (LK. 13.1-5)

Extraordinary suffering no longer betokens inordinate sinfulness. Jesus’ teaching in this passage turns such reasoning upside-down: in response to God’s kingdom, repentance in incumbent upon everyone, lest all suffer consequences conventionally presumed of only ‘consummate sinners’ (cf. Mt. 5.21-48). Also worth noting in Luke 13.1-5 is the emphasis on repentance, twice mentioned, not on sins, which are never mentioned. Repentance is not a matter of feeling sorry for one’s wickedness or insufficient religiosity; to repent is to turn and hold steady one’s life Godward (cf. Lk. 13.6-9; Mt. 3.2/Mk. 1.15; Mt. 4.7; Mk. 6.12). As a matter of course a life Godwardly oriented will give up sinning, instead of bearing toward righteousness (Lk. 13.6–9; cf. Mt. 3./Lk. 3.8; 17:3-4). Mark 2.1-12/Matt 9.1-8/Luke 5.7-26 seem an exception to this rule: ‘When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven”’ (Mk 2.5/Mt 9.2/Lk. 5.20).23 On close inspection, however, neither here nor in any of the Synoptics’ healing stories does Jesus stipulate a sufferer’s repentance from sins, demonstrated or assumed, as prerequisite for healing. Not sin’s abandonment, but rather faith – trust that Jesus wields God’s gracious power to cure – creates the climate for salvation (Mt. 9.22/Mk 5.34/Lk. 8.48; Mk 10.52/ Lk. 18.48; Mt. 9.29; 15.28; Lk. 7.50; 17.19). Forgiveness of sins is broached, not as a step in the paralytic’s cure, but rather to establish the truly controversial point in Mark 2.6-12: ‘Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ (2.7; cf. Mt. 9.3/Lk. 5.21). Throughout the Synoptics variations of this challenge recur: ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ (Mk 2.18; cf. Mt. 9.14/Lk. 5:33). ‘They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him’ (Mk 3.2; cf. Mt. 12.10/Lk. 6.7); ‘By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do them?’ (Mk 11.28; cf. Mt. 21.23/Lk. 20.1-2). Ironically, it is Jesus’ cure of disease that provokes sin among the faithless: ‘The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him’ (Mk 3.6; cf. Mt. 12:14/Lk. 6.11; see also Mt. 9.34; Mt.12.24/Mk 3.22/Lk. 11.15; Lk. 4.23-30;

23

Thus, Joel Marcus: ‘[A] rabbinic tradition, b. Ned. 41a, offers a striking parallel to [Mark 2.5] when it says that “a sick person does not arise from his sickness until all his sins are forgiven him.” Here, as in Mark, we find a linkage between sin and sickness, the phrase “sins are forgiven,” and a reference to the healed person “rising” from his bed’ (Mark 1–8 [AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000], p. 221).

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11.53-54). Conversely, ‘[B]lessed is anyone who takes no offence at me’ (Mt. 11.16/Lk. 7.23).

Forgiveness in the Lord’s prayer Two petitions in the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples raise an interesting theological question. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive all who are indebted to us. (Lk. 11.4 [A.T.]) And forgive us our debts, as [hōs] we also [kai] have forgiven those indebted to us. (Mt. 6.12 [A.T.])

Does God’s forgiveness of our sins depend on, or extend no farther than, our own forgiveness of those sins committed by others against us? Another ancient Jewish prayer (c. 180 bce) suggests that conclusion: Forgive your neighbour the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does anyone harbour anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord? If one has no mercy toward another like himself, can he then seek pardon for his own sins? If a mere mortal harbours wrath, who will make an atoning sacrifice for his sins? Remember the end of your life, and set enmity aside; remember corruption and death, and be true to the commandments. (Sir. 28.2-6)

The petition for forgiveness in Matthew and Luke is both like and unlike the instruction offered in Sirach. Overarching all three is what might be called a channel of mercy, through which divine and human release of sin flows bidirectionally. This idea is clearly expressed in Matthew 6.14-15: ‘For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses’ (cf. Mt. 7.2/ Mk 4.24/Lk. 6.38). One unable to offer forgiveness is incapable of receiving it. At the point where the Lord’s Prayer veers away from Sirach lies an apocalyptic theocentricity. The context of Sir 28.2-6 is the social fabric of an upright life anchored in Wisdom (24.1-29.28). The prayer Jesus taught his disciples emerges from the good news of God’s in-breaking kingdom, for whose coming



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they are first instructed to pray, that the Heavenly Father’s holy sovereignty may rectify everything on earth (Mt. 6.9-10/Lk. 11.2). Within that framework there can be no quid pro quo (Lk. 7.40–43; 17.7-10): the disciple, also in need of rectification, depends entirely on God for sustenance (Mt. 6.11/Lk. 11.3), forgiveness (Mt. 6.12a/Lk. 11.4a), and rescue from temptations to evil (Mt. 6.13/Lk. 11.4b). The forgiveness rendered by Jesus’ disciples is an instance of life healed by God’s power,24 in line with their empowerment to ‘cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons’: all received without payment and given without payment (Mt.10.8; cf. Mk 6.7/Lk. 9.1-2). The Evangelists are well aware that the ability of Jesus’ disciples to forgive debts owed them by others depends upon and pales beside the forgiveness they have first received from God (Mt. 18.21-35; Mk. 11.20-25; Lk. 15.11-32).25

The unforgiveable sin Truly [amēn] I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. (Mk 3.28-29; cf. Mt. 12.31-32/Lk. 12.8-10)

The setting for this solemn pronouncement by Jesus in Mark (3.22, 30) and Matthew (12.24) is his adversaries’ accusation that his ability to cast out demons derives from his allegiance to their ruler, Beelzebul (cf. Jn 7.0; 8.48). Aligning Jesus with demonic forces is tantamount to committing a sin that cannot be released, though all other sins are forgivable. Why is this so? Mark does not explain; such parables (Mk 3.23) are left for Jesus’ audience to unravel. Throughout history the church has worried over this question – understandably so, since the stakes for salvation are so high.26 Previously in Mark, scribes have attributed blasphemy to Jesus for releasing a paralytic’s sins, on the ground that only God may remit them (Mk 2.5-10). In that case Jesus challenged ‘such questions in [their] hearts’ but did not reproach them as unpardonable. Though bewildered, the scribes appear to 24

25

26

The hōs kai (‘as also’) construction in Mt. 6.12 suggests an exemplary case (BAGD [2000]: 1104b). The prophets expected pardon of Israel’s iniquity on the day of salvation (Isa. 55.6-9; Jer. 31.31-34; Ezek. 36.22-32). The interplay of God’s forgiveness of mortals and their forgiveness of one another is examined by Jeongsoo Park, ‘Sündenvergebung im Matthäusevangelium: Ihre theologische und soziale Dimension’, EvT 66 (2006): 210–27. Nicholas Lammé, ‘Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit: The Unpardonable Sin in Matthew 12:22-32’, Mid-America Journal of Theology 23 (2012):19–51, surveys exegetical opinion from the patristic era to the present.

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have attempted the protection of God’s sovereignty. The circumstances in Mark 3.22-30 have shifted. By ascribing demonism to Jesus, scribal misapprehension devolves into a fatal abuse: it is blasphemy, which, in Hellenistic Greek as in modern English, connotes the desecration of God. In both the LXX and the NT blasphemy is ultimately a violation of God’s majesty (2 Kgs 19.4, 6, 22; Isa. 52.5; Rev. 13.6; 16.11, 21); penultimately it comprises derision of godly persons or things (Isa. 66.3; Ezek. 35.12; 2 Macc. 8.4; 12.14; 15.24; Acts 6.11; Tit. 2.5). So also in Mark 3.28: identifying as diabolical the one who conveys God’s holy spirit (1.8, 10) is a peculiar blasphemy, beyond the pale of normal remission, because one thereby drives oneself away from the true agent of forgiveness (cf. ‘the deathward sin’ in 1 Jn 5.16-17). To stretch the metaphor, in Mark 2.17: one will never surrender to therapeutic surgery if one is so deluded that she thinks her physician is a homicidal monster. To put Jesus in league with Satan is so utterly perverse that its proponents put themselves under conditions in which forgiveness is a practical impossibility. In their parallels to this Markan passage, Matthew (12:22-32) and Luke (12.8-12) shift the focus away from Christology to pneumatology: ‘every sin and blasphemy’ (Matt 12.31), even that uttered against the Son of man (Matt 12.32; Luke 12.10a), can be forgiven, but no desecration of the Holy Spirit so vile that it identifies its origin in Satan himself. This notion seems an apocalyptic variant of ‘sin with a high hand’ (beyād rāmāh: Num. 15.30-31; cf. Deut. 17.12): defiant, relentless repudiation of the salvation offered by God’s Spirit.27

Atonement: Purity and Sacrifice, the Temple and Jesus Israel’s ritual sacrifice – articulated in Leviticus 1–7, developed across the centuries after the Babylonian exile and observed at the time of Jesus and his earliest followers – was practised to repair the breach, constantly opened by sin, between the nation and God. Given those assumptions, it is striking that the Synoptics never present Jesus as urging anyone to offer sacrifice through priestly mediation.28 Although Jesus’ hostile activity in the temple (Mt. 21.12-13/Mk 11.15-19/Lk. 19.45-48; cf. Jn 2.13-22) has been typed as its ‘cleansing’, evidence 27

28

Among other ancient Jewish groups, profanation of the sabbath (Jub. 2.27), disavowal of circumcision (Jub. 15.33-34) and disrespect of a community’s members and special teachings (1QS 7.16-17) were considered unpardonable offences. The directives in Mk 1.44/Mt. 8.4/Lk. 5.14 and Lk. 17.14 concern not sin, but reintegration into society of those whose disease had previously isolated them. References to worship at the temple (Mt. 5.23–24; Lk. 1.8–23; 2.22–40; 18.9–14; 24.52) are not dominical dictates; they simply assume its practice.



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for its corruption is hard to come by. The Synoptics themselves point to a more plausible explanation. By his disruption of standard cultic procedure, Jesus gestured toward the temple’s destruction: thus, the fig tree’s cursing, the temple mount’s toppling (Mt. 21.18-22/Mk 11.12-14 + Mk 11.20-25), and the prediction of the temple’s doom (Mt. 24.1-51/Mk 13.1-37/Lk. 21:5–36). Commandeering the temple for his final public teaching (Mt. 21.18–23.29/ Mk 11.27-12:44/Lk. 20.1-21.4), Jesus redirects attention away from ‘all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices’ toward unreserved love of God and neighbour (Mk 12.28-35; cf. Deut. 6.4–5; Lev. 19:18; 1 Sam. 15.22). Likewise – and astonishingly – Jesus abrogates the laws of kashrut (Lev. 11; Deut. 14), relocating defilement in the human heart (Mt. 15.1-20/Mk 7.1–23).29 The concept of Jesus’ self-sacrifice for sin is embryonic in two sayings in the Synoptics: ‘For the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’ (Mk 10.45/Mt. 20:28); ‘this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mt. 26.28/Mk. 14:24/ Lk. 22.20 cf. Exod. 24.8; Zech. 9.11).30 The general idea is clear enough: Jesus volunteers his life for others’ salvation (thus, Lk. 23.13-43). The effective means of that redemption is left unexplained, evoking a mélange of metaphors in Israel’s history: Passover (Num. 9.1–14), the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16), the Suffering Servant (Isa. 42.1-4; 52.13–53.12), the faithful Maccabean martyrs (2 Macc. 6.18-742; 4 Macc. 6.1-7.10). Except for the Epistle to the Hebrews, the particulars of Jesus’ atonement for sin are similarly inchoate elsewhere in the NT. That sets the agenda for soteriological reflection in subsequent Christian thought.

Conclusion Although sin is a genuine concern of the Evangelists, in none of the Synoptics does Jesus analyse the subject. Nor, as a rule, does he harangue his listeners for their iniquity.31 By word and deed – often oblique, at times painfully direct Drawing on Gen. 6.5; 8.21, later rabbis tended to locate the yetzer ha-ra, ‘evil inclination’, in the human heart (e.g. b. Ber. 32a; Pesiq. Rab Kah. 124a-b). The remedy, however, was to fortify one’s adherence to Torah (Prov. 3.5–8), not to annul its commandments. 30 ‘For the forgiveness of sins’ is absent from the Markan and Lukan parallels, as well as from 1 Cor. 11.25. 31 Mt. 23.1-36 is a rare exception, motivated by that Gospel’s peculiar circumstances: see Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21–28: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), pp. 92–4. Even there, however, the targets are ‘blind hypocrites’ whose teaching should be followed though they themselves fail to practise it (vv. 2–3). 29

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– Jesus testifies to God’s sovereignty already at work in his ministry, straightening the crooked in alignment with a holy, rectifying power. Embodying the future of salvation, Jesus embraces the wicked and enables their turning to the merciful and forgiving God, who redirects them toward forgiveness of others and formation of a loving community. The sin of those who reject this good news is exposed: whether as grace or as judgement, an encounter with God’s kingdom leaves no one unchanged. After Good Friday, when evil had done its worst, God vindicated Jesus’ selfless obedience, transformed the wicked, and sanctified the unholy. That, for Christians, is the import of Christ’s resurrection.

5

The Gospel and Epistles of John Gary M. Burge

Each gospel regards sin as a major theological category. John the Baptist preached ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Lk. 3.3; cf. 5.32). Jesus spoke frequently about sin; in some cases he forgave sins (Mk 2.5) and he understood his efforts as directed to ‘sinners’ (Mt. 9.13). Generally the Synoptics describe sin much like Judaism does: it is some moral or ritual failing that requires forgiveness achieved by a work of sacrifice or atonement following repentance.1 There is no doubt that the Fourth Gospel has a sustained interest in sin. John refers to hamartia (sin) more than any other gospel and his first letter gives the theme thorough attention. If we are correct that an early Christian community is represented by these writings, we have evidence of a concern, or at least a motif, that was at the forefront of its thinking. It was a concern so grave that it shaped the wider theological categories of the Johannine literature. Scholars have identified a specialized interest in John and according to some, this interest is out of step with the rest of the New Testament.2 In the Gospel of John, the primary sin we witness is the rejection of God’s revelation in Christ. Sin, therefore, is tied to revelation rather than the usual moral categories we find 1

2

Simply tracing the use of hamartia (sin) in these gospels betrays their emphasis: Mt seven times; Mk six times; Lk eleven times; Jn seventeen times. However the entire hamart* word group (sin, sins, sinful, sinner) shows even more: Mt. fifteen times; Mk fourteen times; Lk. thirty-three times; Jn twenty-five times. The brief letter of First John uses some form of hamartia twenty-seven times. The most current thorough treatment of the topic is found in R. Metzner, Das Verständnis der Sünde im Johannesevangelium, WUNT 122 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). See also T. L. Owing, ‘The Concept of Sin in the Fourth Gospel’, PhD dissertation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY, 1983); J. Zumstein, ‘Die Sünde im Johannesevangelium’, Zeitschrift für Neues Testament 12 (2009): 27–35; G. R. Greene, ‘God’s Lamb: Divine Provision for Sin’, Perspectives in Religious Studies 37 (2010): 147–64; and E.-G. Lyu, ‘Das Verständnis von Sunde im Johannesevangelium’, Korean New Testament Studies 18 (1) (2011): 131–61. Older but still very helpful: see W. Grundmann, harmartanō, TDNT 1:267–316; K. H. Rengstorf, hamartōlos, TDNT 1:317–35.

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elsewhere in the New Testament. This observation is then keyed to the problem of sacrifice and atonement in the gospel, which led Rudolf Bultmann to make the famous statement, that sin (in this gospel) is unbelief: ‘Sin therefore is not primarily immoral behavior; it does not consist in any particular action, but is unbelief.’3 Or as Roger Greene has said: ‘Sin in John is the willful refusal to “believe” in Jesus.’4 It should come as no surprise that John also fails to refer to repentance.5 The problem that Jesus confronts is more fundamental than ordinary sins: it is the world’s comprehensive repudiation of God’s arrival in his creation. John has shifted the depth and scope of this doctrine by viewing it as a foundational theological problem inherent in the human heart. Therefore the mission of Christ confronts the world with a situation it had not entirely seen before and so krisis (judgement) is an apt portrayal of what has happened: the sinful character of humanity has been unmasked and a complete conversion is required.6 John makes this understanding evident in two verses that define sin clearly. During Jesus’ sustained debate with the temple leadership in chs 8–9, we find a diagnosis of Jesus’ opponents: ‘I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he’ (Jn 8.24). Here disbelief is their fundamental sin. In John 16.8-9 we hear the same. During Jesus’ farewell he describes the many achievements of the Spirit-Paraclete who will arrive after his departure. Jesus then explains: ‘And when he [the Spirit] comes, he will convince/convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me.’ The failure to believe, to embrace Jesus, to acknowledge the revelation of what God is doing in Christ – this is what brings the ultimate crisis to the world in Johannine thought. Even though sin is not attached to Jesus’ opponents in John 5, still, this chapter is almost the locus classicus for this theme: the essential problem with Jesus’ opponents is that they fail to see that God is present in Jesus. They do not love God (5.42) and they do not believe Jesus (5.47). This foundational sin can only be resolved when one believes that God has sent Jesus and that God is present in Jesus (5.18). Only then can a person pass from death to life (5.24). 3

4 5

6

Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray, R. W. N. Hoare and J. K. Riches (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971), p. 551; see also idem, The Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel; 2 vols (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1955), 2:53–54. G. R. Greene, ‘God’s Lamb: Divine Provision for Sin’, Perspectives in Religious Studies 37 (2010): 161. But see David A. Croteau, ‘Repentance Found? The Concept of Repentance in the Fourth Gospel’, Master’s Seminary Journal 24 (1) (1 March, 2013): 97–123. W. Grundmann, TDNT 1:306.



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Sin and Revelation John’s discussion of sin is found in two major narratives: a conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem (chs 8–9) and Jesus’ warnings about the opposition his enemies will bring to his followers after his death (chs 15–16). The first narrative is a continuation of Jesus’ teachings at the Feast of Tabernacles that begins in ch. 7 and then continues through ch. 9. This is the longest festival discourse in the gospel and holds a large concentration of references to sin (fifteen references to sin/sinner). However the key to this public argument in Jerusalem is the crowd and the authorities’ inability to identify Jesus correctly (Jn 7.12). Some wish to kill him (Jn 7.19, 25) while others reserve judgement and ask probing questions (Jn 7.26). And yet incomprehension reigns leading to ironic exchanges as the leaders speculate where Jesus has come from or where he is headed. When Jesus says that he is returning to where they cannot come (ostensibly: heaven) they speculate that he is departing to the Diaspora to join the Greeks (Jn 7.35-36). Twice in this discourse Jesus is accused of having a demon (Jn 7.20; 8.48f.). Despite Jesus’ assurances that he has been ‘sent’ (Jn 8:16, 18, 26, 29), that he is from ‘the Father’ (Jn 8.16, 18), and that he can apply God’s divine name to himself (Jn 8.24), still, his audience is incredulous: ‘Who are you?’ resonates through the discourse (Jn 8.25) as a symbol of their incomprehension. As they try to understand, ironic speech is all they can manage. In ch. 9 the healing of the blind man provides a metaphorical picture of the condition of Jesus’ audience. They are blind. The narrative not only gives subtle clues to Jesus’ true identity (Siloam/sent, Jn 9.7) but explicitly lays out a cascade of titles for Jesus (rabbi, prophet, Christ, Son of Man, Lord) so that the reader can barely miss his identity. At every step, the audience simply cannot comprehend the identity of Jesus. Of course this provides irony: the blind man who eventually defends and worships Jesus (Jn 9.38) can see while the Pharisees who interrogate him cannot see (Jn 9.39). And rather than acknowledging their own sin, they proclaim Jesus to be the sinner (Jn 9.24, 31; cf. 9.34). This failure to see, this blindness that denies its own blindness, that proclaims the perfection of its vision, is Johannine language for sin that leads to guilt and judgement (Jn 9.39). When a person stands before revelation proclaiming a confident understanding of what they see – and deny it as revelation from God – this person ‘remains in sin’ (Jn 9.41).7 7

In Jn 9:41 some translations obscure the language of sin: ‘Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see’, your guilt remains.”’ In both cases the term ‘guilt’ is hamartia or sin.

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Against this frame, John’s various references to sin in this discourse (Jn 8:21, 24, 34, 46; 9:2, 16, 24f., 31, 34) should each be interpreted as referring to this collapse of spiritual understanding within Jesus’ audiences. They refuse to believe that God is at work in him and so they are in jeopardy (Jn 8.24). But if John views sin as unbelief, when will the world have the clearest vision of who Jesus is? If sin is a disordered understanding of God-in-Christ, when will Jesus’ truest revelation be made clear? This is the Johannine view of the cross. ‘So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me”’ (Jn 8.28). On his first visit to Jerusalem he said the same, ‘And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’ (Jn 3.14f.).8 The only resolution for this sin, this disordered disbelief, is when a person ‘sees’ Jesus clearly as the blind man saw him. Jesus’ work on the cross is his self-revelation by which the problem of sin may be overcome. John 13.31-17.26 is generally considered Jesus’ farewell discourse. At this upper-room gathering, he prepares his followers for his final departure in death. Most of these paragraphs are words of assurance and preparation but even here Jesus reminds them of the nature of the world and its opposition to him and his message. Once again the same theme regarding sin emerges. The sin of the world is its denial of revelation. ‘If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin’ (Jn 15.22). Therefore it is Jesus’ coming and speaking, it is self-revelation in the world that now has removed any excuse for the world’s sin. And again: ‘If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father’ (Jn 15.24). The revelatory acts of incarnation and divine disclosure, of coming and speaking, now confront the world with a crisis: to refuse this revelation is to enjoin a foundational problem in relation to God. It is to be in sin. However this crisis is not something that will end with the glorification (the death, resurrection, and ascension) of Jesus. Jesus provides multiple promises of the Spirit (Jn 14.17, 26; 15.26; 16.13) and in these we learn that the Spirit, here called the Paraclete (parakletos), will continue this crisis of revelation and judgement that Jesus began.

8

The phrase lifted up (Gk hypsoo) is characteristic Johannine language from the crucifixion implying the ironic juxtaposition of elevation to the cross and elevation as glorification. See Jn 3.14; 8.28; 12.32, 34.



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Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor [parakletos] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convince [elenchein] the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no more; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. (Jn 16.7-11)

Precisely how we are to understand the work of the Spirit in relation to sin, righteousness, and judgement in these verses has been difficult.9 The Greek verb elenchein might be translated ‘persuade’ or ‘convince’. Here the idea is that of convincing (generally the world) about the truth of its wrongdoing. But many scholars see this translation as doubtful.10 But because elenchein is a word that is common in Greek judicial settings, it can also be translated as ‘convict’ (literally ‘to expose’) and this would fit well the trial motif that is found everywhere in the Fourth Gospel. Jesus enters the world and is immediately placed on trial (Jn 5.16-18) but in reality the world itself is being convicted.11 Therefore the Spirit will convict the world, exposing its sin and judging it. This view then must explain the three clauses from 16.9-11. Does the Spirit convict the world concerning its sin, its righteousness, and its judgement? If so, how is the world ‘righteous?’ More likely the Spirit convicts the world of its wrong ideas or its guilt concerning sin, righteousness, and judgement. In the New Testament, elenchein occurs seventeen times and in most cases describes an instance where someone’s sin is exposed (leading to the related idea of conviction). Thus John the Baptist exposes and convicts Herod of sin (Lk. 3.9). Similarly prophesy has the power to convict (1 Cor. 14.24) and Christians are charged to convict or rebuke sinners (1 Tim. 5.20; Jas 2.9; Jude 1.5) and enemies of the faith (Tit. 1.9). Therefore the meaning of the verb has to do with exposing sin and its guilt. And in John the judicial context sharpens

9

10

11

See John Aloisi, ‘The Paraclete’s Ministry of Conviction: Another Look at John 16:8–11’, JETS 47 (2004): 55–69 and D. A. Carson, ‘The function of the Paraclete in John 16:7–11’, JBL 98 (1979): 547–66, summarized in D. A. Carson, The Gospel of John (Leister: IVP, 1991), pp. 534–9; G. M. Burge, The Anointed Community: The Holy Spirit in the Johannine Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), pp. 208–11. For a summary, see C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to John, An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1978); U. C. von Wahlde, The Gospel and Letters of John, 3 vols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 2:697; also BDAG3 (1999), p. 315. This interpretation follows a widely accepted understanding of the ‘trial motif ’ in the Gospel of John. See A. E. Harvey, Jesus on Trial: A Study of the Fourth Gospel (London: SPCK, 1976) and A. T. Lincoln, Truth on Trial: The Lawsuit Motif in the Fourth Gospel (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2000).

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it further: this is exposure leading to the conviction and judgement of the world. The fundamental idea is this: the world has already conducted its ‘trial’ of Jesus and found him guilty and deserving of death. But the reality is that Jesus was innocent and the world instead stands accused of error and sin. The Spirit-Paraclete unveils to the world the real nature of sin and righteousness and judgement in light of what God has done in Jesus. The clauses that follow 16.8 likely indicate cause (‘… about sin, because it …’) but do not each belong to the world.12 In vv. 6–11 the words (sin, righteousness, judgement) possess no article and so the Spirit unveils the truth about these ideas, not specific instances of the world’s sin, etc. Here Keener helpfully echoes the words of W. H. P. Hatch from 1921: The Paraclete would convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment: the sin is the world’s unbelief in the Son, the one provision for salvation (v.8; cf. 1;29, 8:24); the righteousness is that of God and his people, established by the vindicated, exalted, Jesus as heavenly advocate against all the accusations of the world (v.9; cf. 8:46); the judgment (condemnation) is that of the ruler of the world, the accuser of God’s true people, has been judged in Jesus’ glorification and shown to be wrong (v.11; cf. 12:31–32, 14:30-31).13

The issue is not that men and women in the world commit sins. The more fundamental issue is that the world is in error concerning Jesus. It has misunderstood who Jesus is and therefore is incapable of removing itself from the darkness. As in a grave and major trial, the verdict will be announced with absolute clarity: the world is guilty. The world may be persuaded to accept it, but it cannot deny that the verdict has been given any more than a criminal can miss the judgement passed on the final day of his or her trial. But since the world cannot receive the Spirit, this operation will be effected through the work of the church which has the Spirit and which provides a testimony to the truth. The disciples who had been wrongly accused are affected too. This word from the Spirit confirms their confidence in the truth, their assurance that accusations against them are false and that a divine prosecution of the world has already begun because the world in its sinfulness has rejected Jesus.

12 13

Carson, The Gospel According to John, p. 537; Barrett, The Gospel According to John, p. 487. C. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003) 2:1034; W. H. P. Hatch, ‘The Meaning of John XVI, 8–11’, HTR 14 (1921): 103–5.



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Sin and Infirmity John 5 and 9 enjoy a surprising literary symmetry. Here we have two men in need of healing (a paralytic, a blind man), two pools (Bethesda,14 Siloam15), two Sabbath violations, two enquiries from the men, two confrontations with the Pharisees, two follow-up encounters with Jesus, and two very different responses.16 But in addition to these parallels, in each case the relation of sin and the men’s infirmities appears.17 Certainly John intends to have these narratives read together. Following the healing at Bethesda, Jesus tells the man in 5.14: ‘See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse befall you.’ And then in 9.4 – possibly because they remembered Jesus’ comment in 5.14 – the disciples remark: ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Is there a connection between sin and infirmity in John? It may be no accident that in each case the men are using pools of ritual purification in Jerusalem (the two major pools for entering the temple) and this underscores the connection between sin and healing.18 When Jesus meets the now-healed paralytic in the temple in John 5.14, the man has likely come to the temple either to have his healing confirmed by the priests or to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving. But then an unusual exchange occurs. The ancient world made a direct connection between sin and suffering: one always caused the other. However both the Old Testament and Judaism carefully parsed the relationship between them. Sin might cause a variety of There are many textual variations to the name of the pool in Jn 5 such as Bethesda (NIV, TNIV, ESV, HCSB, and NASB), Bethzatha (RSV, NRSV, NET), Belzetha, or Bethsaida (not to be confused with the E. Galilee location). Clearly scribes did not know the location. Qumran refers to ‘Beth’esda’ (3Q15 11.12–13), which means ‘house of flowing’ and Bethesda is the English transliteration of it. Once contested, it is now confidently located on the north side of the city near the church of St Anne. Bethesda is the generally accepted name among scholars. 15 The newly discovered pool is on Jerusalem’s south side and is certainly a large public mikveh or ritual bathing pool. See U. Von Walde, ‘The Pool of Siloam: The Importance of the New Discoveries for our Understanding of Ritual Immersion in Late Second Temple Judaism and the Gospel of John’, in P. Anderson, F. Just and T. Thatcher, Jesus John and History. Volume 2. Aspects of Historicity in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta: SBL, 2009), pp. 155–74. 16 For the full parallels, see A. Culpepper, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), p. 139; also C. H. Dodd, Historical tradition in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 181–3; J. P. Pilch, Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), pp. 126–7. 17 K. H. Wynn, ‘Johannine Healings and the Otherness of Disability’, Perspectives in Religious Studies 34 (2007): 61–75. 18 See G. M. Burge, ‘Revisiting the Johannine Water Motif: Jesus, Ritual Purification and Two Great Pools in Jerusalem’, in J. C. Laansma, G. Osborne and R. Van Neste (eds), New Testament Theology in Light of the Church’s Mission. Festschrift for I. Howard Marshall (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), pp. 123–34. 14

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illnesses19 but one could not automatically conclude that one who suffered had previously sinned. Nevertheless here in John 5.14 Jesus is bringing the two together. Some activity of the man led to the consequences he now endured. Or more sharply: sin contributed to who he was in his suffering, sin had broken him and what resulted was this infirmity. Sinful human activity, in other words, can result in suffering. But if sin can result in suffering, can the sin of parents result in the suffering of their child? This was a common judgement in antiquity and most would have accepted it. Exodus 20.5-6 makes this claim explicit: ‘You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.’ In Judith 7.28 a plea urges the following: ‘We call to witness against you heaven and earth and our God, the Lord of our fathers, who punishes us according to our sins and the sins of our fathers. Let him not do this day the things which we have described!’ In John 9.1-5 the disciples raise this possibility directly and their brief discussion has led to no end of theological confusion. The blind man in Jerusalem had been blind since birth (Jn 9.1) and so had no occasion to sin and thus cause this infirmity. This leads a disciple to inquire about its origin (Jn 9.2) and whether he or his parents were to blame. This sort of question would have been utterly common. Jesus rejects this entire line of reasoning in John 9.3 but many translations introduce difficulties in how they handle the verse. The TNIV (similarly ESV and NRSV) reads: ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’ In this rendering the blindness was given to him so that God might be glorified. It is not hard to see the theological implications of this line of thought. God brought this suffering to the man so that God might glorify himself in the man’s healing. While a sound theology cannot doubt God’s sovereignty to do as he pleases, still, thoughtful Christians might see this as a cruel fate in which God inflicts pain on people simply to glorify himself. However the purpose clause of John 9.3b (‘so that [hina] the work of God …’) can just as well be applied to John 9.4 and no doubt it should.20 Such clauses may 19

20

See Craig Keener, The Gospel of John, 1:643–5; 777–8 for many numerous sources; cf. A. Oepke, TDNT 4:1092–5. See Craig Keener, The Gospel of John, 1:779, who cites J. C. Poirier, ‘“Day and Night” and the Punctuation of John 9:3’, NTS 4 (1996): 288–94.



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begin a main sentence in Greek rather than follow it. Of eleven uses of the Greek all’ hina (‘but so that’, 9:3b) in John, four of them precede their main sentence (Jn 1.31; 13.18; 14.31; 15.25). This means John 9.2-4 might be translated as follows: ‘“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus. “But so that the work of God might be displayed in his life, we must do the work of him who sent me while it is still day.”’ The purpose clause now explains that Jesus must work so that God’s work might be displayed in the man’s life. God did not make the man blind in order to show his glory; rather, God sent Jesus to do works of healing in order to show his glory. The theological nuance of the two translations could not be more different. Nevertheless in both instances (Jn 5 and 9) the Fourth Gospel presents us with two mirrored dramatic stories of suffering that open conversations about sin. In one instance, we find a warning about sin and its consequences; the next story corrects false notions of sin and its origins. Either way, God is not implicated in these accounts as the source of illness. But we wonder: is sin implicated? In ch. 5, sin is the culprit. Worse things could happen if the healed man continued to sin. In ch. 9 while neither the sin of the blind man nor his parents is the source of this infirmity, still, here we have the one chapter in John with more references to sin than any other (nine times sin/sinner). While sin has not led to the suffering of the blind man, still, sin has led to other unexpected infirmities in the chapter. It is an ironic spin that John frequently enjoys in this gospel: he rejects the notion that sin closed one poor man’s eyes but suggests that indeed sin can close the eyes of many others. In a splendid narrative turn, the Pharisees tell the now-healed blind man that he was ‘born in sin’ (Jn 9.34), something that Jesus has already rejected (Jn 9.3a). The Pharisees, however, are blind in an entirely different way and this has resulted directly from their sin (Jn 9.41). The lame man had done something to lose his mobility. The Pharisees have done something to lose their sight. Both have sinned. And so in a paradoxical way we learn: Sin will indeed cause infirmity but in ways we rarely suspect.

Sin and Sacrifice John’s emphasis on the universality of sin as a paralysing condition in the world is clear. He sees that the foundational problem is the world’s refusal to believe in Jesus as John 9 illustrates dramatically. The critical problem with the Pharisees is not that they have sinned but that their disbelief is an expression of sin so profound that it places them in judgement. Like the healed blind man, they

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simply must identify Jesus, believe in him, and eventually worship him (Jn 9.38). This reordering of belief, this willingness to step toward the light (in Johannine terms) is the only solution to the deepest problems that trouble the world. But is it correct to say that John has abandoned the traditional notion of sin as moral wrongdoing requiring forgiveness-through-sacrifice? Scholars have discussed this at length and many have reduced or eliminated altogether the sacrificial/redemptive role of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. The cross is not a place of sacrifice and forgiveness but only a place of revelation and glorification. However John 1.29 suggests otherwise. In each of the Synoptic Gospels, the baptism of Jesus is announced with a heavenly voice that uses language from Psalm 2 to proclaim the divine sonship of Jesus: ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’ (Mt. 3.17). John’s account of the baptism emphasizes the descent and permanence of the Spirit (‘I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven, and it remained on him’, Jn 1.32) and the explanation that this baptism occurred so that Jesus might be revealed to John the Baptist and to Israel (‘I myself did not know him; but for this I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel’, Jn 1.31). Thus even the baptism for John has revelatory dimensions. The Fourth Gospel, however, records the Baptist making one unexpected proclamation: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’ (Jn 1.29). This saying is peculiar because ‘lamb of God’ appears in no Jewish writings preceding the New Testament.21 In this verse sin is something to be removed thanks to the ‘lamb of God’. A variety of suggestions have tried to interpret this image from apocalyptic lambs of Jewish eschatology (1 En. 89–90) to the suffering servant of Isaiah (Isa. 53.7). But the best interpretation supported by the majority of scholars points to the Passover lamb well known in Judaism. This solution fits with the Passover motif that drives John’s passion narrative and explicitly links Jesus’ sacrifice to the festival (Jn 19.36). Some have argued that the Passover lamb was not viewed as a sacrificial offering but this connection now seems clear. Josephus, for instance, refers to the Passover as a ‘sacrifice’ (Antiquities, 2.312) and this fits how Judaism attached sacrificial emphases to the Passover. But John the Baptist says more. This lamb will take away the sin of the world. The removal of sin is one work of Jesus and it is expressed throughout the gospel. This means that Jesus’ death is a sacrificial death that works on behalf of his followers. So in John 10.11, ‘The good shepherd lays down 21

It does appear in some of the Testaments of the Patriarchs (T. Joseph 19.11; T. Benjamin 3.8) but these are generally considered Christian scribal interpolations. See L. Morris, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 126.



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his life for (Gk hyper, on behalf of) the sheep’ (also Jn 10.15). Or there is Caiaphas’ ironic counsel: ‘You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for (Gk hyper) the people, and that the whole nation should not perish’ (also Jn 18.14). This expression is not infrequent in Paul’s explanation of Christ’s sacrificial death (Rom. 5.6, 8; 1 Cor. 15.3; 2 Cor. 5.21; Gal. 3.13). But the key text is John 6.51 where Jesus explains that his cross-work, the giving of his flesh, will be done on behalf of the world: ‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for (hyper) the life of the world is my flesh.’ This language is deeply reminiscent of the Synoptic Eucharistic texts (Lk. 22.19) where sacrificial language is explicit.22 Christ’s death then is also an offering, a sacrifice, a genuine giving of his life for the sake of (in behalf of) those who are sinners.23 Thus with Schnackenburg: The Logos became flesh in order to give this flesh over to death; the Incarnation is being taken seriously. Jesus is not just the revealer, but also the bringer of salvation, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (1:29), the one who was pierced and out of whose body there flows a stream of life and blessing (cf. 19:34). These are Johannine ideas, and make it possible to regard 6:51c as an integral part of the discourse about the personal bread of life.24

But announcing this work of the cross is also the work of the church. In John 20.23 this theme is reinforced when Jesus commissions his followers: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ This text follows Jesus’ breathing on them in order to give the Spirit on Easter (Jn 20.22). And as they learned in 16.8 one work of the Spirit will be the ongoing application of Jesus’ revelation for the sake of the world. The Spirit will convict the world of its sin and this will present the possibility of its forgiveness (Jn 20.23). The Spirit, then, not only reveals the truth about Jesus but presses home the effects of the Son’s forgiving, redemptive work for the sins of the world. Protestants have been quick to clarify that this is not a word of forgiveness brokered by disciples. John 20.23 offers a ‘divine passive’ (sins are

Codex Sinaiticus (and numerous other mss) rearranges the sentence placing ‘give’ with ‘for the life of the world’ to closely imitate the Eucharistic language of Lk. 22.19 and 1 Cor. 11.24 reinforcing the sacrificial symbolism of Jn 6. 23 The full details of the Eucharistic interpretation are given by R. W. Brown, The Gospel According to John, 2 vols (New York: Doubleday, 1966) 1:282–93. 24 R. Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, 3 vols (ET; New York: Seabury, 1980), 2:55; similarly, C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to John, p. 298. 22

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forgiven, tas hamartias apheōntai) signalling that God forgives and disciples announce in the kerygma the goodness of this news. To be sure, a whole generation of scholars such as Bultmann, Käsemann and Haenchen recognized the sin/sacrifice/redemption motifs in these texts but attributed them to later editors (redactors) who were supplementing John’s emphasis on sin as disbelief and salvation as revelation. But today their approach to John’s Gospel is not in vogue and most see this sacrificial theme as adding appropriate complexity to John’s view of sin.

Sin and the Johannine Letters It is common for Johannine scholars to discuss the evolution of the community that prized the Fourth Gospel and its accompanying letters. This evolution belonged to the community itself or to the source of the Johannine tradition (no doubt the Beloved Disciple).25 Certainly shifts can be located within this literature. For example, the high Christology of the gospel may have neglected a true incarnational dimension and this led to the threat of docetism. Which explains why the earliest gnostic Christians such as Valentinus or Cerinthus adored this gospel. Possibly at some stage the gospel gained its prologue (Jn 1.1-18) as well as portions of its epilogue (ch. 21) that corrected these issues by bringing graphic realism to the incarnation (Jn 1.14). The letters of John (coming from the same stage of the gospel’s editing or shortly after) reinforce this incarnational realism. ‘Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Messiah’, that is, the incarnate Jesus whom we could see and hear and touch (1 Jn 2.22; 1.1). If disbelief was the signature concern that preoccupied the Johannine community, then it is possible that some of John’s followers taught that enlightenment or knowledge (hence ‘belief ’) were at the centre of Christian faith. The gospel would have been their guide where the vocabulary of knowledge is used over 140 times (Gk oida, ginōskō). Discipleship was about knowing and believing, living a life enlightened by the truth and the secrets God gives exclusively to ‘his own’ (‘I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me’, Jn 10.14). Righteousness was less about right behaviour and primarily centred on right belief. On the history of the Johannine community in current research, see G. M. Burge, Interpreting the Gospel of John, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), pp. 5–33, 73–6.

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If this community also promoted a docetic worldview, it makes sense that it would disregard sins committed in the flesh since, as John 6.63 had taught them, the flesh is of no importance. Moreover the high emphasis on the Spirit in this tradition may have underscored an ecstatic, pneumatic spirituality that led to a perceived perfectionism: The Father and the Son would be living in them (Jn 14.23), they would possess the Spirit of Truth (Jn 14.17) and so would be able to know all truth (Jn 16.13). In fact belief enabled them to do greater things than even Jesus did (Jn 14.12), because through faith Jesus would do whatever they asked him (Jn 14.13). The problems that emerged from this Christian self-view set the stage for the many references to sin in First John. Christians were saying that they had no sin (1 Jn 1.8, 10) and could see no need to confess (1 Jn 1.9). John is absolutely clear that sin and confession should be acknowledged and practised among all believers. ‘If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves’ (1 Jn 1.8). The truth (The Spirit of Truth?) is not in those who refuse to admit to sin (1 Jn 1.8c). John is being forced to confront former disciples (generally termed the ‘secessionists’) who now think that their belief has made them exempt from moral error. And yet here John finds himself on the horns of a theological/pastoral dilemma: how does he reinforce the commonality of sin without promoting indulgence in sin itself? First, the apostle sounds warnings against the denial of sin in the starkest terms. Such denial is self-deception (1 Jn 1.8) and it calls God a liar (1 Jn 1.10) because, as 1 John 4.10 says, it was God who sent his Son into the world that it might be saved. In other words, the world needed to be saved and sin is what it needed to be saved from. It also means that such people do not have his (God’s?) word in their lives (1 Jn 1.10). This phrase echoes John 8.37 where we learn from Jesus why his opponents refuse him: ‘because my word finds no place in you’. Second, once the reality of sin is acknowledged, the letter clarifies that Jesus’ death has accomplished their forgiveness. ‘I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his sake’ (1 Jn 2.12). In addition, Jesus continues to be an advocate (Gk parakletos) on our behalf with God (1 Jn 2.1). And then in 1 John 2.2 and 4.10 John employs the technical term for sacrificial forgiveness or atoning sacrifice (Gk hilasmos) that occurs only here in the New Testament. Variations of it (hilasterion) can be found only in Romans 3.25 and Hebrews 2.17. The meaning of hilasmos enjoys considerable debate among scholars but there is consensus on this: it occurs six times in the Greek Old Testament (Lev. 25.9; Num. 5.8; Ps. 129.4 [130.4 in English]; Ezek. 44.27; Amos 8.14) and in every case except the Amos text it refers to the removal of guilt

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from sin. This is further established through the Septuagint’s frequent use of the cognate verb (exilaskesthai, 105 times) and this makes the sacrificial, redemptive motif even clearer.26 In a word, Jesus’ death in Johannine thought is not simply about revelatory enlightenment and belief – it is also about sacrifice, forgiveness and atonement. Third, John is fully committed to the purity or sanctification of his followers. He can refer to God and say, ‘We shall be like him’ (1 Jn 3.2) because as we strive in this hope we ‘purify’ ourselves (1 Jn 3.3). Jesus had no sin (1 Jn 3.5) and so his followers should imitate him in this. But this call for purity immediately sets up a tension between perfection and sin. How can we both acknowledge sin and expect ourselves to be pure? 1 John 3.4-7 mirrors 3.8-10 and provides perhaps the clearest NT condemnation of sin. If Paul’s discussion in Romans 6 is a guide, once sin is acknowledged and the grace and love of God are certain, some may exploit sin ‘so that grace may abound’ (Rom. 6.1). John rejects this. But he adds: ‘You know that he appeared to take away [our27] sins …’ (1 Jn 3.5) – that is, Jesus’ work on the cross has now made needed forgiveness available. We have the possibility of genuine holiness. John then continues: ‘No one born of God commits sin; for God’s nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God’ (1 Jn 3.9; cf. 3.4, 6). John’s characteristically bold statements in these verses have led to numerous theological struggles for the average Christian and led many to see an unresolvable contradiction in John’s view of sin. Does John believe in perfectionism? But what about his equally firm commitment to genuine sinfulness? Initially we can dismiss the notion that John believes Christians can be sinless. In 1 John 1.8-2:1 (cf. 1 Jn 5.16-17) he has made this clear. In the present verses John is presenting an ideal, a vision of Christian character that emphasizes purity and holiness. One common solution concentrates on the tenses of the verbs in these verses. In Greek a present tense (in certain forms) indicates continuous, repeated activity.28 Four key occurrences deserve attention. (1) In 1 John 3.6a See C. G. Kruse, The Letters of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 73, 75–6; in addition to the extensive use of exilaskesthai, hilasterion occurs 28 times in the LXX; hilaskomai, 12 times showing its wide use in Jewish thought. 27 Some Greek manuscripts add ‘our’ here while others include ‘the sins of the world’. These are both scribal interpretations to make clear John is talking about the sins of believers, not sin in general. Hence John uses the plural ‘sins’. 28 See K. Inman, ‘Distinctive Johannine Vocabulary and the Interpretation of 1John 3:9’, WTJ 40 (1977–78): 136–44; S. Kubo, ‘1 John 3:9: Absolute or Habitual’, Andrews University Seminary Studies 7 (1969): 47–56. 26



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and 5.18 John says that Christians ‘do not sin’. The Greek verb (to sin) appears in the present indicative and the sense is that we should not have the ongoing, self-endorsing habit of sin. (2) In 1 John 3.6b the construction uses a present participle (‘those who sin’ or better ‘those who continue to sin’) to express the same notion. Once again, a participle with a present tense implies ongoing activity. (3) In 1 John 3.9a a different verb is used (‘to do sin’) and sin appears as a noun. Again, it appears as a present tense. (4) Finally, in 1 John 3.9b John describes Christians as not ‘able to sin’. Both the verb (to be able) and its infinitive (to sin) appear in the present tense. Using this interpretation John may be protesting ongoing, habitual sin that has no place in the church. But a few scholars have noted problems with this view.29 Chiefly it seems that John may not diligently follow the grammatical function of present and aorist tenses this carefully (see 1 Jn 1.8). Many would also say that the texts are contextual and controlled by the theological controversy in the community.30 John is confronting people who seem to say that Christians are free to ‘sin’ (since ethics is irrelevant anyway by their accounting).31 In 3.7 their influence is described and a warning is sounded. Therefore the real subject is a sort perfectionism that has no regard for righteousness. But we may be able to be more specific. John may be writing against the problem of a particular sin, namely, the disposition of the secessionists being debated in 1 John. In this case the issue is not the sinning of Christians generally (although John would have this in view) but the theological heresy that is confronted throughout the letters and promoted by the secessionists. If this line of reasoning is correct it explains the severity of John’s criticism in 3.8-10 (‘The one who does what is sinful is of the devil’). The children of the devil – those who sin thus – are the ones who deny Christ, are not the children of God and do not love fellow believers. John also says that this sin is ‘lawlessness’ (anomia, 1 Jn 3.4) and this word in the LXX is frequently connected to a sin as a work of the devil (see 1 Jn 3.8).32 And if we are right in this view, it helps us understand John’s difficult discussion in 1 John 5.16-17: ‘If any one sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin [Gk a sin that leads not to death], he will ask, and God will give C. Kruse, The Letters of John, pp. 126–32. J. Bogart, Orthodox and Heretical Perfectionism in the Johannine Community as Evident in the First Epistle of John (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). 31 H. C. Swadling, ‘Sin and Sinlessness in 1 John’, SJT 35 (1982): 206–9, who suggests that 3.6 and 9 are slogans that John is quoting from the secessionists. 32 I. de la Potterie, ‘“Sin is Iniquity,” (1 Jn 3, 4)’, in I. de la Potterie and S. Lyonnet, The Christian Lives by the Spirit (New York: Alba House, 1971), pp. 79–143. See the summary in Kruse, The Letters of John, p. 128. 29 30

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him life for those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin which is mortal; I do not say that one is to pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal.’ Here we learn that there is a severe form of sin that exceeds all others not unlike the synoptic saying about unforgivable blasphemy (Mt. 12.31; Mk 3.29). In John’s mind there are sins of unremitting consequence. This may be an echo of the OT distinction between accidental and intentional sins. The temple sacrificial rituals covered the former (Lev. 4.2, 13, 22, 27; 5.15-18; Num. 15.27-31; Ps. 19.13) while the latter were either exiled (Num. 15.30-31) or killed (Deut. 17.12). This dual classification of sin persisted into Judaism of the New Testament period (cf. Qumran, 1QS 5.11-12; 10.20-21: ‘I will have no pity on those who depart from the Way’). John may be saying that a sin that leads to death may be the secessionist’s error. In 1 John 3.15 they do not have eternal life and so now belong to the realm of darkness, evil and have rejoined the ‘world’ (1 Jn 4.5). Jesus did not pray for the world of unbelief (Jn 17.9) but concentrated on his followers. Here John says the same. Therefore this is a type of sin that belongs to a type of person, namely, those who have abandoned the Father and the Son.33 They have severed themselves from God, and rejected the truest meaning of the Son. This is apostasy. Brown concludes: ‘The secessionists are the living continuation of those whom in his lifetime Jesus condemned because they refused to believe (Jn 3.18-21).’34

Conclusion It is clear that John understands and promotes an understanding of sin that parallels the traditional teaching of Paul and the Synoptics. This is evident not only in the Fourth Gospel but is particularly clear in the Johannine letters. A docetic Christology that denies the importance of the incarnation because it denies the value of ‘the flesh’ will also deny the importance of ethics and thisworldly righteousness. John rejects this aggressively. But in the Fourth Gospel, the concern is more comprehensive and perhaps more profound. We might put it thus: the Johannine view of sin has been recast by the gospel’s dualism; the human problem is born from the harsh division between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, to which humanity is 33

34

See R. E. Brown, The Epistles of John (New York: Doubleday, 1982), pp. 612–19; also I. H. Marshall, The Epistles of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 246–8, although he does not use Brown’s secessionism paradigm. Brown, The Epistles of John, p. 618.



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captive. John understands that Jesus is not merely addressing sins per se – he is confronting sin as a fundamental spiritual predisposition throughout the world. Or in Johannine language: ‘And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil’ (1 Jn 3.19). In the Fourth Gospel, humanity is disordered and this expresses itself most clearly in the rejection of God who has appeared in Christ. In this gospel, Jesus confronted this sort of sin. And in the Johannine Epistles this same disposition resurfaced within the ranks of John’s own community among the secessionists. This is sin at its most basic and devastating level. It is a corruption endemic in a world that ‘loves darkness rather than light’. And the world’s only hope – the only hope of forgiving and repairing this sin – is the interruption of this darkness through the gracious initiative of God. ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ (Jn 1.5).

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Paul Timothy G. Gombis

Paul regards sin in a complex manner in his letters. Sin is the corruption of humanity, having to do with individual disobedience and corporate behavioural perversions. Sin is also a cosmic power that has will, intention, specific aims, and strategies to achieve those aims. In this essay, I will describe how Paul envisions sin as the corruption of human worship that works against God’s intentions that humanity functions and flourishes as the image and glory of God. I will then discuss Paul’s conception of the embodied corruptions of sin, and sin as the corruption of human community. Finally, I will give attention to the cosmic power of Sin and how Paul argues with regard to the universality of sinfulness. While I will make reference to a number of Paul’s letters, I will give perhaps the most attention to Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians. It is here that we find extended discussions of sin, sinfulness, and the power of Sin.

Sin as the Corruption of Worship In Romans 1.18-3.21, Paul describes how all humanity is subject to sin (Rom. 3.9). He has in view both groups of Christians in the Roman house churches, but his argument extends to all humanity.1 His field of vision in this section is universal in order that everyone may be charged as partaking of sinful humanity. With reference to the immediate rhetorical context, however, this initial stage of his argument sets up how both groups in the Roman church partake of salvation 1

The precise character of the problem Paul is addressing in Romans is notoriously difficult to determine. It appears that two groups are in conflict, but scholars are divided as to whether these are Jewish and non-Jewish groups in the Christian church, or whether the church is fully gentile with one group already adopting a Jewish way of life as the way of participating in the salvation of the God of Israel revealed in Jesus. For a survey of the various scenarios, see the essays in Karl P. Donfried, The Romans Debate, rev. and exp. edn (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991).

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in Christ on equal terms and thus have no grounds of claiming priority over one another (Rom. 3.27-30). They are equally under sin and together in need of being justified by faith. Paul orients his account of human sinfulness in terms that echo the narrative of Genesis 1–3. Paul signals the original role and function of humanity in Romans 3.23, where he writes that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’. Reading this statement in a narrow ‘moral’ sense misses Paul’s point. It is not that all have failed to match the moral perfection that God required. Rather, Paul is pointing to God’s original intention for human beings: they were created to function as God’s glory by embodying and reflecting the very character of God in and through interdependent human relationships.2 This function of humanity entailed bodily conduct that had a telos, behaviour that pointed beyond humanity itself to its creator. It was the glory of humanity to be the glory of God, to acknowledge and to make manifest that the one who created and upheld all of creation, including humanity, of course, was indeed the one true God. Paul uses ‘glory’, ‘honour’ and ‘image’ language synonymously throughout Romans 1–3 since they are related in the Scriptures of Israel. Throughout Genesis 1–2, humanity is called ‘image of God’, created to embody on earth the nature of the invisible God. As ‘image’, God calls humanity to fill the earth and to rule over it, overseeing the spread of God’s visible rule. Psalm 8 envisions this same role in terms of humanity being ‘crowned with glory and honour’ (Ps. 8.5). According to Paul’s inherited Jewish worldview – informed as it was by the Scriptures –humanity was created by God as God’s ‘glory’, his ‘image’ placed in his cosmic temple, and designed for ‘honour’ in God’s good world. Along this line, Paul portrays human behaviour as worship and service. In Romans 1.25, he states that one of the ‘exchanges’ involved in human sinfulness is the exchange of ‘the truth of God for a lie’, in that humanity ‘worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator’. Two Greek verbs appear in v. 25 to elaborate what is involved in the surrender of the truth of God: esebasthēsan (‘worship’) and elatreusan (‘service’). These verbs open up a rich vision of all that it meant to be human according to God’s intention for humanity at creation. According to Genesis 2.15, Adam and Eve were in the garden ‘to till it and keep it’. The two Hebrew terms appearing here that are often translated in this way 2

For an excellent discussion of the addressee in Scripture as the interdependent community, see Carl Raschke, The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), pp. 151–8. His proposal overcomes the false dichotomy over whether Scripture addresses the individual or the community.

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may also be translated as ‘to worship and obey’.3 This text, then, may be casting a holistic vision of human conduct in creation as worship and service. That is, humanity embodied their worship and service to the Creator both in the full range of their activities with one another and in their care for God’s world by ruling it, overseeing the spread of God’s visible rule within it, and bringing forth creation’s flourishing and proper ordering. Paul expresses the rejection of humanity’s role as ‘image of God’/‘glory of God’ in the two ‘exchange’ statements in Romans 1.23, 25. In v. 23 Paul states that humanity has ‘exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being’ and of a variety of other things within creation. The exchange is restated in v. 25, where Paul notes that humanity ‘exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator’. While commentators have noted that Paul’s critique is more or less the indictment of humanity for the sin of idolatry, his discussion amounts to a subtler description of idolatry than is often recognized. Beyond merely a perversion of cultic practice – ceremonial worship of idols instead of the one true God – Paul envisions the perversion of the broader conduct of humanity in relation to its creator. Humanity has taken on a radically different identity in relation to its original created intention. Humanity has abandoned its intended function of pointing beyond itself to the one true God and instead has taken on the role of pointing to, or representing something within creation. No longer does humanity ‘image’ God, conducting itself as the glory of God in all of its activity, but now ‘images’ something within the created order – whether human or animal.4 This, as Paul goes on to show, is a tragic move with devastating bodily consequences. This exchange entails viewing the human body not as the representation of God designed to relate to others and care for creation in line with God’s character. Rather, the human body is pointing beyond itself to something within creation, or perhaps even pointing to itself as the ultimate end of creation, which is a surrender of the true glory of humanity in exchange for shame. This exchange is stated again in v. 25, where Paul notes that humanity has exchanged the truth of God for a lie. The dative phrase en tō pseudei (‘by the lie’) is usually translated so that it points to the exchange of the truth of God ‘for a 3 4

Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1972), pp. 122–3. This is not to say that Paul claims that the image of God is lost or that humans are no longer in the image of God. In the strict sense in which he means it, however, humanity has surrendered this role and now has become in the image of other entities. This point is crucial for his argument in this rhetorical situation and Paul very well may have wanted to say much more about the image of God if the questions were different in other rhetorical situations.

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lie’, though it is more likely the exchange or abandonment of the truth of God ‘by the lie’, perhaps alluding to the lie of the serpent believed by the deceived Eve. Either way, what has been given up here is the truth of God, which is paralleled in v. 23 by the ‘glory of the immortal God’, so that ‘the truth of God’ also appears to be a functional term, pointing to the true function of the human – the proper embodied conduct that fills out the richness of the term ‘image/glory of God’.5 In this light, the verbs in Romans 1.25, in perhaps an allusion to Genesis 2.15, again point to the profundity of the exchange by humanity. Humanity now envisions itself as representing something else within creation – perhaps humanity itself, or some creature, or certain social practices that point to membership in a social class or ethnic group, or a set of ideals invented by humankind. The broad scope of human conduct is depicted by Paul as worship, pointing to something beyond itself, the embodiment of a transcendent reality. This worshipping function has been corrupted in that humanity now envisions itself as the representative of, and its conduct as giving glory to, that which has no glory in itself. Humanity now embodies a reality that the creature is the ultimate. This exchange, according to Paul, has had devastating consequences for human bodies and human community. Because humanity, in a cosmic act of betrayal, envisions itself as the image of something within creation, God has given humanity over to the perverted functioning of the body (Rom. 1.24, 26, 28). In v. 24, Paul states that ‘God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves’. In v. 26, Paul states that God gave women and men over to the degrading and dishonourable uses of their bodies, and this is epitomized in same-sex erotic relationships. In Paul’s inherited Jewish worldview this represents the ultimate bodily malfunction – that women and men, designed by God to relate bodily to one another and corporately to bear the image of God on earth, would turn away from that intended function. The result of this exchange and subsequent perverted functioning ultimately is the enslavement of the human body to sin and death. Paul states in v. 27b 5

Most commentators view ‘the truth of God’ as having to do with God’s revelation of God’s own attributes and character (e.g. J. D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8, WBC vol. 38A [Waco, TX: Word, 1988], p. 63). Understanding the phrase ‘the truth of God’ in v. 25 as having to do with the true functioning of humanity rather than as abstract truth from or about God makes good sense of the context. It informs the suppression of the truth in unrighteousness in v. 18, which is often regarded as the suppression of certain things that should have been known by humanity. If this is regarded functionally, however, it speaks of the culpability of humanity in abandoning their proper created role as being the image of God. This suppression takes place through ungodliness and unrighteousness, which are active pursuits by humanity.

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that humanity has ‘received in their own persons the due penalty for their error’. While some read this final phrase as having specific reference to some punishment for homosexual behaviour, it appears that for Paul the error in view is the profound functional exchange made by all of humanity (Rom. 1.25).6 As Richard Hays states, ‘the creature’s original impulse toward selfglorification ends in self-destruction’.7 The problem in Paul’s portrayal of the human dilemma, then, is the captivity of the human body to sin and death, and this problem affects all humanity. And finally, in a very familiar passage, Paul states plainly that all humanity – both Jews and gentiles – has failed to function rightly as the image and glory of God: ‘for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3.23). Humanity has utterly failed to function rightly as the image and glory of God and conducted themselves as if they were in the image of something else, whether of some pagan deity so that humanity is debased, or of some tribal deity in the sense that one ethnic group are exclusivists who judge and stand over against the rest of humanity. Humanity’s exchange of worship and created function has resulted in the debasement of the human body, its inevitable corruptions, and its enslavement to sin and death.

Sin as Embodied Corruptions Sins, for Paul, are acts that people commit that run counter to the behaviours, practices and patterns of life to which God calls humanity in creation. Sins are corruptions of humanity’s original embodiment of the ‘image of God’. Paul elaborates these in a number of vice lists (e.g. Rom. 1.29-31; 1 Cor. 5.10-11; 1 Cor. 6.910; Gal. 5.19-21; Eph. 5.3-5).8 Humanity’s corruption in sin is manifested in behaviours as well as internal dispositions. The catalogue in Romans 1 demonstrates both the sinful practices into which humanity has fallen, and the consequences of being turned over by God to dishonourable uses of the body: ‘They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 6

7

8

It is unlikely that the statement of Paul in v. 27b is pointing to some immediate bodily condition. He most likely has in mind the enslavement of the human body to sin and death, which he develops throughout chs 5–8 (cf. Katherine Grieb, The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness [Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2002], pp. 28–31). Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, and New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 385. James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 124.

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slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless’ (Rom. 1.29-31). The initial section of Romans (1.18-3.20) closes with a catalogue from the Scriptures of Israel that indicts Jews and non-Jews – all humanity – with special emphasis on the captivity of all humanity under the bondage of sin and the results in the corruption of human bodies: ‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one.’ ‘Their throats are opened graves; they use their tongues to deceive.’ ‘The venom of vipers is under their lips.’ ‘Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.’ ‘Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known.’ ‘There is no fear of God before their eyes.’ (Rom 3.10-18)

Paul’s rehearsal of the corruption of body parts may be incidental but given the pervasive use of ‘body’ language throughout the letter to speak of human bodies and corporate bodies of humans, Paul likely intended to stress the lengths to which sin has affected and infected human bodies resulting in the breakdown of human community.9 Dunn captures the social dimension of the sins Paul lists: ‘The effect of sin is seen at its most serious not so much in secret vices practiced in private, but in the breakdown of human relationships.’10

Sin as the Corruption of Human Community As indicated above, for Paul sin involves social behaviours that destroy human community. Two extended discussions that play crucial roles in the arguments 9

10

To extend the crucial character of Paul’s ‘body’ talk, the salvation accomplished by God in Christ has to do with putting to death ‘sin in the flesh’, resulting in Paul calling Christians to present their bodies as a singular sacrifice to God (Rom. 12.1-2). The culmination of Paul’s letter comes in Paul’s hope that the two factions in the Roman church(es) will be able to praise God with one ‘tongue’ (Rom. 15.6). Dunn, Theology of Paul the Apostle, p. 124.

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of two of Paul’s most significant letters bear this out: Romans 14.1-15.13 and 1 Corinthians 8.1-11.1. In both of these passages, Paul directly confronts the issues that are causing divisions in the Roman and Corinthian communities. In the Roman situation, he discerns that two groups who have conflicting conceptions of acceptable behaviour in light of God’s revelation in Christ are respectively judging the opinions of others and regarding with contempt the practices of others (Rom. 14.3). In the Corinthian situation, some in the church are eating food sacrificed to idols, a practice that is destroying the faith of other Christians (1 Cor. 8.7). While the final major section of Romans (Rom. 14.1-15.13) is often neglected in readings of the letter, it is the argumentative climax of the letter. It is here that Paul makes direct exhortations to the two groups in the Roman church who are at odds. While there is no shortage of interpretative difficulties in understanding these two groups identified here as ‘the strong’ and ‘the weak’, Paul notes that ‘the strong’ are being tempted to pass judgement on the opinions and mode of life of ‘the weak’ (Rom. 14.1). And ‘the weak’ are being tempted to regard ‘the strong’ with contempt (Rom. 14.3). ‘The strong’ appear to be those in the Roman church(es) who understand the relativity of cultural practices, while ‘the weak’ are those whose consciences are bound to regard the ethnic distinctive practices commanded in the Mosaic Law to be binding for all people at all times.11 ‘The weak’ do not regard these as mere preferences. Paul identifies himself with ‘the strong’ when he states that ‘nothing is unclean in itself ’ (Rom. 14.14). That is, even though the various practices that constitute a Jewish ethnicity are mandated in the Mosaic Law, eating this or that animal is not in itself a clean or unclean practice. It also is clear that Paul casts the divisive corporate practices that have provoked his epistle in stark moral terms. The lack of sensitivity on the part of ‘the strong’ may be regarded as ‘evil’ (Rom. 14.16) and amounts to tearing down the work of God (Rom. 14.20). Again, to give offence in matters of eating amounts not merely to making the food unclean, but evil. And finally, Paul identifies the lack of deference to others in the Roman church as ‘sin’ (Rom. 14.23) What exactly does Paul mean by his enigmatic statement in v. 23: ‘But those who have doubts are condemned if they eat, because they do not act from faith; for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin’? Readers of the English text are not helped by the translation of the participle diakrinomenos as ‘those who have 11

See the discussion in John M. G. Barclay, Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews (WUNT 275; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), p. 43.

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doubts’. Paul does not have in view here one who is unsure of what he should do, whether he should be eating certain food. As I indicated, because this term appears in close proximity to ‘faith’, it appears in English translation that what is being contrasted here is one who is confident in his lifestyle choices and one who is unsure. Is it that the one who is less sure is sinning because he isn’t certain that what he is doing is acceptable or not? It is more likely that Paul is using pistis here (‘faith’) in continuity with how it appears in the rest of the letter. He speaks of ‘the obedience of faith’ (Rom. 1.5; 16.26), a ‘law of faith’ in contrast to a ‘law of works’ (Rom. 3.27) and of the apistia (‘unfaithfulness’) of Israel to its commission to be a light to the nations (Rom. 3.3). We might say that, in Romans 14.23, what is ‘of faith’ is a response on the part of the Roman Christians that embodies what God wants from human communities: wholehearted participation in the right-making work to which God committed himself in calling Israel as a nation and which is fully revealed in the gospel, the news about the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. In this specific instance, what is ‘of faith’ is behaviour that accords with God’s intention to create in Rome a community of believers of various convictions who nonetheless ‘welcome one another’ to the glory of God (Rom. 15.7). Actions ‘of faith’ are those that foster the unity of the church. Alternatively, ‘the one who doubts’ is not one who is unsure about his choices. In this passage, diakrinō more likely has the meaning of a person who is divided in his own mind or intentions. This person has mixed motives as he participates in community. Rather than wholeheartedly participating in community in a way that defers to the interests and convictions of others, resulting in a self-sacrificial pattern of social conduct, this person has mixed motives. It may appear that he desires fruitful community life, but he also aims to enjoy it on his own terms with the result that he asserts his perceived rights, giving offence to others. For Paul, what this person does is ‘sin’ (Rom 14.23) because his motivation and behaviour is not ‘from faith’ and thus is out of keeping with God’s unifying intentions for the community. Indeed, his behaviour directly counters the purposes of God in the community. He is destroying ‘the one for whom Christ died’ (Rom 14.15). Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 8.1-11.1 is similar, though it has its own unique features. Paul writes to a church with which he is more familiar rather than one he has not yet visited personally, as is the case with the Roman church. He is more direct with the Corinthians. Further, his discussion in Romans turned on Jewish food laws and observation of the Jewish calendar. In 1 Corinthians, he addresses the practice of some in the Corinthian church of buying and eating food that had been offered to idols. Some in the Corinthian church feel free to

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do this based on their ‘knowledge’ that because the idol does not represent any actual entity, the food offered to the idol is unaffected and can be purchased and consumed without worry (1 Cor. 8.1-6). But this practice, endorsed by the ‘knowledge’ of the realities of the spiritual realm, is doing damage to others in the Corinthian church. In fact, there are more recent converts in the church who do not have this ‘knowledge’ and cannot grasp fully the reality that there is no such thing as an idol. When they see fellow members of the Christian church eating food sacrificed to idols, they are scandalized because they imagine that Christ is in league somehow with idols and the idolatrous ways of life out of which they were delivered. In this way, those who are ‘weak’ are destroyed (1 Cor. 8.9-10). Just as in the Romans context, Paul calls this behaviour sin, claiming that the Corinthians who behave this way are sinning against their brothers and sisters and sinning against Christ himself (1 Cor. 8.12). 1 Corinthians 8 is part of a larger argument that stretches to 1 Corinthians 11.1, in which Paul commends to them a mode of participation in community shaped by self-sacrifice. He sets himself forth as an example of self-giving love. He makes himself a servant to all people for the sake of the gospel so that he also can participate in it (1 Cor. 9.1-27). At the end of his discussion, he calls the Corinthians to follow his example of a self-giving life just as he has sought to embody the self-giving pattern of life of Christ (1 Cor. 11.1). These two passages, both crucial to the larger arguments of which they are part, demonstrate that Paul sees sin in terms of the breakup of the church community. Patterns of conduct that cause division in the church are serious in that they destroy what God is building (1 Cor. 3.16-17). As Michael Gorman argues in his recent work on the atonement, the main thrust of the atonement in the New Testament is that it is the work of God in Christ whereby God brings into being the new creation people of God.12 Behaviours that work against the purpose for God sending his Son and raising him from the dead can only be referred to as sin.

Sin as Cosmic Power Throughout Romans 5–8 Paul speaks of sin as an enslaving cosmic power. Sin does not merely consist in human misdeeds. Rather, sin is a cosmic force for 12

Michael J. Gorman, The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014).

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Paul. Many Pauline interpreters, seeking to designate this aspect of sin, capitalize references to Sin as that entity that ‘entered’ into the world (Rom. 5.12), ‘reigned’ (Rom. 5.21), ‘seized the opportunity through the commandment’ (Rom. 7.8, 11), ‘deceived’ and then ‘killed’ the ‘I’ speaking throughout Romans 7.7-25. Sin appears as an entity with a will, aims, intentions, and a strategy to fulfil its goals. Scholars in the increasingly popular ‘apocalyptic’ school of Pauline interpretation note that Sin plays a significant role in the cosmically contested battleground that is present human experience.13 The ‘apocalyptic’ actors Death and Flesh, in league with Sin, have hijacked God’s good gift of the Law and made it an unwitting accomplice in their enslavement of humanity. These cosmic forces are in league with other supra-human cosmic rulers, to which Paul often refers as the ‘powers and authorities’, among other designations.14 What unites various interpreters into a coherent angle of approach called ‘apocalyptic’ is the depiction of an enslaved cosmos and an understanding of God’s work of invading this enslaved condition in his Son who then deals a death-blow to these cosmic anti-God forces in his death, resurrection, and sending of his Spirit. Paul writes to the Roman church that both groups involved in the developing rift were together under the power of Sin, along with the rest of humanity (Rom. 3.9). God has brought them into a new cosmic realm in Christ and by the Spirit so that they now inhabit ‘this grace’ (Rom. 5.2). Their corporate error in their dispute is that they are orienting their community dynamics according to the power of Sin. Because they are boasting over-against one another and judging each other, they are embodying a community mode of life that advertises the rule of Sin and Death (Rom 6.1, 12). They are dead to that realm, having been rescued from it and delivered into Christ by the Spirit. They need to orient their community dynamics according to the rule of Christ, presenting the members of their body (i.e. the various people in the singular community) as slaves to righteousness and to God himself. 13

14

For an introduction to an apocalyptic angle of approach to Paul, see the essays in Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Apocalyptic Paul: Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5–8 (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013). Two commentaries that work out an apocalyptic reading of Galatians are those by Martinus de Boer and J. Louis Martyn (de Martinus C. Boer, Galatians: A Commentary [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011]; J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [New York: Doubleday, 1997]). On Romans see Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980). For a thoroughly apocalyptic reading of Paul’s theology, see Christiaan J. Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980); Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). On this apocalyptic power alliance, consisting of the supra-human ruler figures and the cosmic entities of Sin, Death and Flesh, and how Paul in Galatians portrays them as conspiring together to array themselves against God and his people, see Bruce W. Longenecker, The Triumph of Abraham’s God: The Transformation of Identity in Galatians (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998).

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Paul discerns the cosmically contested environment up and running in the Roman church. It is possible for the Roman community to inhabit their ‘old humanity’, to engage in community dynamics that activate and stir up the presence of Sin and Death, resulting in community breakdown. He wants them to live into the fullness of their new cosmic location in Christ. They are the ‘new humanity’, called to creatively activate new community behavioural patterns and relational dynamics designed to stir up the presence of God’s life-giving Spirit, resulting in renewal, mutual service, and community rejoicing. It is likely this scenario that has a cosmic scope that sets the stage for Paul’s discussion in Romans 7.7-25. Using the rhetorical device of a speech-incharacter, Paul articulates the Roman church’s experience of how they have ended up in an enslaved condition even though they have been emphasizing the Mosaic Law.15 Because one group in the church has been using the Law to endorse its claims to ascendancy over the other group, they have turned the Law into an ally of Sin and Death, resulting in destruction. On the contrary, Paul wants them to serve no longer in ‘the oldness of the letter’, but in ‘the newness of the Spirit’ (Rom. 7:6). These two expressions are nearly synonymous with those found in Romans 8.2: ‘the Law of the Spirit of Life’ and ‘the Law of Sin and Death’. This inclusio that brackets the speech of the ‘I’ in Romans 7.7-25 indicates two uses of the Law among the Roman Christians. Paul discerns that some are using the Law as an ally of Sin and Death, whereas he wants them to read the Law so that it is what fosters the purposes of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. The main thrust of the speech of the ‘I’, therefore, is to show how the Roman church, despite what appears to be good intentions, has transformed God’s good Law into a tool in the hands of Sin and Death. It was the brilliance of Sin, manifesting itself as truly sinful in that it turned what is good and holy into a cause of death. There is, however, a way that the Law can be freed from these cosmic anti-God forces so that it becomes a community-building tool used by the Spirit to unite. They must read the Law as Scripture, hearing it so that it fosters a community of mutual service and love rather than using it to highlight one set of ethnic practices over another. Much more could be said, of course, regarding the cosmic scope of the work of God in Christ against those forces arrayed against God’s people. It will be 15

Throughout his work on the rhetorical devices employed in Romans, Stowers cites a range of ancient rhetorical sources that discuss the use of speech-in-character (Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994]). See Thomas Tobin’s work on Romans in which he takes up Stowers’s research on ancient rhetoric and argues that the ‘I’ in Rom. 7 is identified as the Roman church (Thomas H. Tobin, Paul’s Rhetoric in its Contexts: The Argument of Romans [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004]).

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sufficient for now, however, to note that Paul envisions a contested climate at the ‘crossover of the ages’. Because this is currently ‘the present evil age’ but also the time of new creation, rival cosmic forces are at work determining the battlefield upon which Christian communities forge their common life. While Western readers of Paul regard him from their location in post-industrial cultures shaped by the Enlightenment and its attendant scientific conception of reality, Paul counsels his communities from the perspective of an ‘open heaven’.

Sin and Sinners In at least two passages, Paul indicates that some groups in the churches to which he wrote regarded others as sinful rather than themselves. In Galatians 2.11-14, Paul reports on his confrontation of Peter while in Antioch. What follows in Galatians 2.15-21 may be part of that speech or it may be an extension of the logic of that speech that has direct reference to his audience in Galatia. Regardless, it constitutes Paul’s strategy of revealing a prejudice on the part of some Jewish Christians that they did not share the sinful past of the non-Jews in the church. Paul writes that even though ‘we ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners’, even we (i.e. Paul and Peter) are found among our gentile sisters and brothers in similar need of justification by faith. This is because of the reality that no one has an inside track with God, but all must be justified before God based on faith in Christ. What is evident here is the conviction that while the non-Jews in the Christian churches had a history of being ‘sinners’, the Jewish Christians were not. They come from among the historic people of God and so did not inhabit a group called ‘sinners’. This same assumption underlies Paul’s likely sarcastic passage in Romans: ‘For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom. 56-8). There may have been some in the Roman church who regarded themselves as above their non-Jewish sisters and brothers in Christ. They were not ‘sinners’ from among the gentiles. If this is the case, then Paul indicates that they do not partake of the benefits of Christ’s death. Why would anyone die for a righteous person? Perhaps one would die for a ‘good’ person, but still, what would be the point? But God demonstrates his love in that Christ died for ‘the weak’, ‘the ungodly’ and ‘sinners’. Everyone in the Roman community must own these

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identities or they surrender any claim to participation in the group of those for whom Christ died, whom he has also justified and reconciled to God (Rom. 5.9, 10) and whom he will finally save in the end (Rom. 5.10). These two polemical contexts foreground the reality that for Paul, all of humanity constitutes the category ‘sinners’ (Rom. 5.12) and all are ‘under the power of Sin’ (Rom. 3.9; Gal. 3.22). Because of this, no one has a claim to boast over against anyone else based on ethnic privilege or personal achievement (Rom. 2.1; 3.27-30). All stand in need of the right-making work of God in Christ, ‘for all have sinned’ (Rom. 6.23), and ‘God shows no partiality’ (Rom. 2.11).

Conclusion According to Paul, all humans are sinners because they have all sinned and all are under the bondage of the cosmic power called Sin. It would be to say too much to claim that all humans are equally sinful or that they all are as sinful as they possibly could be. Further, Paul’s discussions on human sinfulness in such passages as Romans 1.18-3.20 and Ephesians 2.1-3 are not meant to be diagnoses of the condition of each and every individual. These passages must be regarded within their rhetorical and communicative contexts. Yet for the apostle, human sinfulness is manifest in that humans do not live holistic lives that constitute the worship of the one true God. They have become self-seeking, selfish, and behave in ways that are destructive to human community. The good news, of course, is that just as the character of sin is complex in Paul’s letters, so, too, is the gospel he proclaims. That is, while the character of sin is more robust and far-reaching than many are led to believe, God’s saving power and his work in Jesus Christ and by the Spirit are far more robust than is often realized. God has conquered the power of sin and broken Sin’s enslaving grip over creation. He is at work to free humanity from this cosmic power even as the day of its final destruction draws near. And in Christ, God provides for the salvation of humanity and as many as are baptized into Christ are freed from wrath and have no fear of condemnation or judgement (Gal. 1.4; 1 Cor. 15.3).

7

Hebrews and the General Epistles David M. Moffitt

Hebrews and the General Epistles (we here refer to James, 1 and 2 Peter and Jude) share some common themes and assumptions as they address the problem of sin. All five texts are heavy on exhortation. Their authors direct their epistles to insiders – those who already belong to the community of believers in Jesus.1 As such, much of the exhortation of these letters focuses on the need to remain firm in one’s commitment to this belief and to the community of the faithful. One of the central characterizations of sin in these texts is, therefore, turning away from Jesus and the believing community, and/or returning to a past state and past behaviours. Each of these epistles also seeks to reinforce a reorientation of disordered desires. Sin arises when one’s primary orientation or inclination is towards the present, visible world. This entails accepting the logic and values of the evil age. Humanity in general is inclined to desire the corruptible things of this world. These texts argue that a proper orientation for life looks instead towards unending life in unhindered fellowship with God in the future age. Thus entering into the coming, eternal realm is the goal of such an orientation. This desire for God and for obtaining the promises he has made stands at the heart of faith. Life that is rightly ordered in the here and now – a faithful life – is life lived in line with the eschatological hope of this future inheritance made possible by Jesus’ salvific work. 1

Dale Allison has recently challenged the conclusion that James is directed to communities of believers, arguing instead that the epistle intends to foster good relations between Christ-believing Jews and non-Christ-believing Jews in synagogue contexts (D. C. Allison, Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle of James [ICC; London: Bloomsbury, 2013] pp. 33–50; cf. his earlier article ‘The Fiction of James and Its Sitz im Leben’, RB 108 [2001]: 529–70). Yet most interpreters agree that the connection of Jesus’ name in James 1:1 with the title ‘Lord’ creates a presumption that the text is intended for believers (cf. Jas 2.1) (Allison argues that the reference to Jesus here is a textual emendation).

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The crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus are, however, more than just the means for salvation. They also reveal a divine/heavenly logic wherein death does not determine or delimit what is real and meaningful. The blessing and glory of restored fellowship with God stands on the other side of suffering. Thus death cannot ultimately prevent God from making good on his promises. Faithfulness to God, even when this results in suffering and death, will find its reward in the future. To continue living in sin or to return to the sin(s) one had previously abandoned upon believing in Christ is to question the character and power of God. Those who live like this risk forfeiture of the inheritance God has promised for his children. The ethical logic of these texts therefore attests, to one degree or another, the influence of apocalyptic sensibilities on their understanding of Christian identity. In general, these texts also agree on the importance of stability and maturity. As just noted, sin is linked with a lack of confidence in God and in one’s own convictions about him. Convictions that shift frequently – beliefs and practices easily adopted or abandoned are signs of immaturity that correlate closely with an inclination that produces sin. Suffering is viewed in these documents as a proving ground whereon one’s mettle is tested. To endure suffering is to grow in maturity, to become more stable and less susceptible to disordered desires. To turn from God in the midst of suffering is to sin because this again elevates the present over the future. In the discussion that follows we explore each of these epistles, noting the ways they characterize sin. It should be stated at the outset that these texts are not systematically reflecting on sin so much as they are responding to and warning about sin. Hebrews and James seem to say more about the underlying factors that produce sin. On the whole, however, our study must often rely more on implications deduced from the positive exhortations found in these documents than on their explicit accounts of the logic of sin. We begin with Hebrews, which in many and various ways stands apart from the other letters examined here.

Hebrews Hebrews is an ancient sermon whose original preacher wrote out the text and sent it as an epistle (cf. Heb. 13.22-25).2 Unlike the General Epistles 2

For a succinct summary of the arguments and evidence for the sermonic qualities of Hebrews see



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(excepting perhaps Jude), the epistolary conclusion of Hebrews and certain details throughout the text (e.g. Heb. 10.33-34; 12.4) indicate that the writer and the audience were personally acquainted. This suggests that Hebrews was, like Paul’s letters, originally written to a particular congregation facing particular struggles. When, therefore, the author speaks about sin, something he does frequently throughout the homily,3 he almost certainly intends to redress specific problems in the congregation of which he and they are aware. The writer’s shared knowledge with the text’s original recipients likely explains why he says so little about the precise nature of the problems he seeks to correct. Because the author relays little specific information about himself or his audience, little can be discerned with certainty about his identity, the make-up and locale of the original audience, or the precise date of the composition.4 Interpreters are left to puzzle out the most plausible background for the sermon from the limited evidence that lies within the text. Nevertheless, the general contours of the author’s concept of sin emerge clearly in his brief ‘word of exhortation’ (cf. Heb. 13.22), even if the specific circumstances and problems facing the first readers are now hard to explain. The writer begins his homily by emphasizing the ongoing reality of God’s speech. God spoke in the past by way of prophets, but now he speaks to his people by way of his Son (Heb. 1.1-2). The author continues this emphasis on God’s speech throughout the sermon by identifying God as the speaker of a variety of statements in Scripture (see e.g. Heb. 1.5-13; 3.7-18; 5.5-6; 8.8-13; 10.30; 13.5). At times God’s voice in Scripture directly exhorts the audience (esp. Heb. 3.7-15; 12.5-6). The congregation is even now being warned by God from heaven, presumably, as he says in Hebrews 1.2, through the voice of the Son (Heb. 12.25; cf. 3.1). The author, in keeping with his insider focus, stresses that the congregation had responded appropriately to God’s voice in the past. Specifically, they had previously accepted the message they heard about Jesus from his earliest disciples (Heb. 2.1-4). They had even been subject to and endured past

3

4

esp. G. L. Cockerill, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 11–16. ‘Sin’ language (i.e. words built on the hamart- root) occurs twenty-nine times in twenty-seven verses in Hebrews (see 1.3; 2.17; 3.13, 17; 4.15; 5.1, 3; 7.26, 27; 8.12; 9.26, 28 (2x); 10.2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 17, 18, 26 (2x); 11.25; 12.1, 3, 4; 13.11 [note that 10.6, 8, 18, and 13.11 refer not to sin committed but to the so-called ‘sin offering’ often rendered in LXX as peri (tēs) hamartias]). A number of other related words, phrases and concepts are also used (e.g. parabasis, transgression (2.2; 9.15); parakoē, disobedience (2.2); parapikrasmos, rebellion (3.8, 15; see the cognate verb parapikrainō in 3.16); sklērunein tēn kardian, to harden the heart (3.8, 15; 4.7; cf. 3.10, 12, 13; 10.22); apeitheia, disobedience (4.6, 11; see the cognate verb apeitheō in 3.18; 11.31); nekrōn ergōn, dead works (6.1; 9:14); adikia, unrighteousness (8.12); agnoēma, transgression committed out of ignorance (9.7)). See the careful discussion of these matters in H. W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), pp. 1–13.

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persecution as a result of their commitment to Jesus (Heb. 10.32-34; cf. 6.10). Because they previously believed the report about Jesus, the author identifies the central root of their current problem as apistia – unbelief or, more literally, lack of faith/faithlessness (a-faith). Among the primary manifestations of such faithlessness are: (1) failing to maintain one’s commitment to the shared confession5 (e.g. Heb. 4.14; 10.23; cf. 2.1; 3.14); (2) departing from the community of the faithful (esp. Heb. 10.25; cf. 6.4-6); and (3) spurning Jesus, the blood of the covenant he mediates, and the Spirit (Heb. 10.29). The common thread running through these descriptions is that of actions that disobey God’s call to come into his presence and orient one instead away from God and his people. Thus, sin in Hebrews is primarily conceptualized as the refusal to obey God’s voice that follows from lack of faith in God’s ability to make good on his promises. The author appeals to the failure of Israel in the wilderness, particularly as this is mediated through Psalm 95, as especially illustrative of sin. When God commanded the people to enter their inheritance, associated in Hebrews with God’s protological rest (Heb. 4.4-7), they listened instead to other voices and refused to obey God’s voice (cf. Num. 13.27-14.10). In a way analogous to that episode, Hebrews locates the congregation in the wilderness poised to enter the ultimate, promised inheritance.6 In the past the people in the wilderness sinned because, although they heard the word of God (Heb. 3.16; 4.2), they did not have faith/they were apistia (Heb. 3.19). Rather than moving towards God and the promised inheritance being offered to them (Heb. 3.12; 4.11), Israel at that time disobeyed. Because of this they were not allowed to enter the land. The negative example of Israel implies that the audience must not turn back from the divine summons that they now hear in Christ. If they do, they too might 5

6

The author refers to a particular confession three times in the homily (Heb. 3.1; 4.14; 10.23). Two of these references, Heb. 4.14 and 10.23, occur in the context of exhortations to hold to the confession. He also speaks in Heb. 13.15 of confessing ‘his name’, which most likely means the name of Jesus. While the writer never details the full content of this confession, three factors imply that it included some affirmation of Jesus’ identity as high priest: (1) the author calls Jesus ‘the high priest of our confession’ in 3.1; (2) the material that stands between the exhortations of Heb. 4.14 and 10.23 not to surrender the confession (i.e. 5.1-10.20) consists largely of an extended discussion of Jesus’ high-priestly status and service; and (3) the argument of Heb. 7 offers a legitimation of Jesus’ highpriestly status in spite of his Judahite lineage (esp. Heb. 7.13-14). The repetition of the exhortation to hold to the confession therefore suggests that some were doubting or repudiating their earlier belief that Jesus was a high priest. The fact that Jesus did not descend from the tribe of Levi might well be at the heart of such doubt and/or rejection. For a more lengthy discussion of this position see D. M. Moffitt, ‘Jesus the High Priest and the Mosaic Law: Reassessing the Appeal to the Heavenly Realm in the letter “To the Hebrews”’, in Problems in Translating Texts about Jesus: Proceedings from the International Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, 2008, eds M. Caspi and J. T. Greene (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2011), pp. 195–232. For an excellent exploration of this point see M. Thiessen, ‘Hebrews and the End of Exodus’, NovT 49 (2007): 353–69.



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lose the opportunity to enter the promised rest (cf. Heb. 6.4-6). Such a refusal to obey God’s call is directly contrary to God’s will not only because it rejects the blessing God wants to give his children, but also because it calls into question God’s ability to do what he has promised to do. While this lack of faith primarily expresses itself in sins that orient one away from God and the promises he offers his children, one might wonder: what motivates such faithlessness and sin? As is shown below, James identifies passion or desire that inclines toward evil as the root cause of sin (Jas 1.14–15; cf. 1 Pet. 2.11; 2 Pet. 1.4; Jude 16). Hebrews, however, nowhere explicitly answers this question. The author does, though, assume that something is fundamentally wrong with the present human condition. Apart from Christ, humans are both enslaved to the fear of death and subject to a guilty and impure conscience. These two interrelated forces appear to be the main drivers of apistia and so also of sin. As such, humanity is in need of salvation by having these two problems solved. Humans, that is, need both to be freed from their slavery and to be purified if they are to obey God’s voice and do his will by moving towards him rather than away from him. On the one hand, then, salvation is necessitated by humanity’s peculiar subjection to the power of death and the one who wields this power – the devil (Heb. 2.14). Because of this situation, humanity lives in a state of perpetual enslavement to the fear of death (Heb. 2.15). The author never plainly affirms Paul’s claim that death came into the world through Adam’s sin (Rom. 5.12-19), nor does he explicitly refer to Adam anywhere in the homily. Yet his argument that the heavenly Son of God became the particular human being, Jesus, who, in accordance with Psalm 8, has now been elevated above everything else in creation, including the angels, suggests that he has Adamic traditions in mind (see Heb. 2.5-18).7 The idea of Adam’s fall is also likely to be assumed by the author as the explanation for why humanity finds itself subjected to the devil and enslaved to the fear of the power of death. In keeping with Paul and other New Testament voices, the author believes that Jesus’ death solves this problem by defeating the devil and freeing those enslaved by fear of the power of death (Heb. 2.9, 14-15; 9.15). It should be 7

Several have noticed possible allusions to Adam in Heb. 2 (e.g. F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, rev. edn (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), pp. 72–4; J. Héring, L’Épitre aux Hébreux (CNT 12; Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1954), p. 34; G. Gäbel, Die Kult Theologie des Hebräerbriefes: Eine exegetische-religionsgeschichtliche Studie (WUNT 2/212; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), pp. 142–4; J. Marcus, ‘Son of Man as Son of Adam, Part 1’, RB 110 (2003): 38–61, esp. 52–5. For my own defence of the importance of Adam in Hebrews 2 see D. M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (NovTSup 141; Leiden: Brill, 2011) pp. 130–44.

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noted that the significance of Jesus’ resurrection in Hebrews has often gone unnoticed in modern scholarship.8 Yet both (1) the logic of Jesus’ elevation as a human being above the angels in the heavenly realms, and (2) the emphasis that Hebrews places on Jesus’ high-priestly ministry of offering and interceding for his siblings in the heavenly tabernacle (Heb. 7.23-26; 8.1-6; 9.24-26; cf. 2.17-18) suggest that Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is essential to the author’s claim that Jesus defeated death and the devil. Nevertheless, Hebrews 2:9 and 2.14-15 especially identify Jesus’ death as a key element within the larger narrative of the Christ event for how he accomplished the redemption of God’s people from slavery.9 On the other hand, the author also believes that humanity suffers from the interrelated problems of guilt and impurity, especially at the level of the conscience. The Levitical sacrificial system provided means for dealing with problems of sin, guilt and impurity. Specifically, the manipulation and presentation of blood, which is life (e.g. Lev. 17.11, 14; cf. Gen. 9.4; Deut. 12.23), was essential for obtaining purification and forgiveness for the offerer (e.g. Lev. 4.20, 26; 12.8; 14.19-20; 16.15-16). Because God punishes sin and refuses to dwell in earthly spaces tainted by impurity or allow impurity to come into his presence, purity and forgiveness were necessary to maintain the covenant relationship. Obtaining forgiveness and purification, which was among the central goals of sacrifice, helped ensure that God’s presence would remain among his people and that God’s people could dwell close to his presence.10 Hebrews works with this sacrificial logic to develop an analogy between Jesus’ sacrifice and the Yom Kippur sacrifices prescribed in Leviticus. Thus, when reflecting on Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, the author emphasizes one of the most central atoning elements of the sin offerings of Yom Kippur – the high priest’s conveyance of the blood/life of the sacrifice into God’s presence in the holy of holies (cf. Lev. 16.15-16). Jesus, 8 9

10

See Moffitt, Atonement, esp. pp. 1–43. The author famously emphasizes Jesus’ Yom Kippur sacrifice and high-priestly ministry throughout his sermon more than any other sacrificial ritual or role. His connections in Heb. 2.14-15 and 9:15–18 between Jesus’ death, redemption, and covenant inauguration suggest, however, that he has not ignored the importance of the historical and conceptual linkage between Jesus’ death and Passover. The only explicit reference to Passover in Hebrews occurs in 11:28 where the author notes that the blood of the Passover lamb protected Israel from the ‘destroyer of the firstborn’ (ho olothreuōn ta prōtotaka). Nevertheless, the connection of Jesus’ death with freedom from the devil’s enslaving power and with the inauguration of the new covenant recalls the feast that celebrates God’s redemption of his people from their slavery in Egypt and the inauguration of the Mosaic covenant that the exodus made possible. See e.g. J. Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 68–72; H. Maccoby, Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and Its Place in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 1, 11, 27, 47, 170.



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as humanity’s great high priest, passed through the heavens (Heb. 4.14) in order to offer his sacrifice to God in the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 8.1–6; 9.11-14, 24-26). The author believes that the priestly acts of drawing near to God and offering blood effected limited purification for God’s people (Heb. 9.10, 13, 22). By way of analogy to the Levitical prescriptions, the author explains how Jesus’ act of passing through the heavens and appearing before his Father in the heavenly holy of holies brought ultimate forgiveness and purification (i.e., sacrificial atonement) to those for whom he ministers (Heb. 9.14; 12-13; cf. 1.3). Moreover, Jesus’ purification extends even to the conscience, something the author thinks the Levitical sacrifices were unable to do. Jesus’ performance of the heavenly, high-priestly Yom Kippur sacrifice therefore maintains the covenant he mediates. Thus, as was the case in a limited way under the Mosaic covenant, God and his people can now dwell together. The forgiveness and purification Jesus has obtained for his people ensures that they can approach God and dwell in his presence in their eternal inheritance.11 The preceding discussion suggests that the twin problems of enslavement to the fear of death and impurity both exert negative pressure that influences people to disobey God’s voice. Instead of approaching God and moving towards the promised inheritance he offers, death and impurity motivate people to turn away and thereby sin. In other words, apistia and its manifestation as sinful actions flourish when these problems are unresolved and/or allowed to determine the way one lives. The author of Hebrews therefore appeals to the confession of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and high-priestly entrance into God’s presence to assure the congregation that both of these problems have been solved. Because of Jesus, full atonement is now a reality. Thus, instead of living in a way determined by an orientation that pushes one to refuse God and turn from him, Hebrews exhorts its readers to live in line with the reality of the atonement Jesus’ has obtained for them. Because of Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, they are the redeemed, forgiven and purified community who can (and one day ultimately will, Heb. 9.28; 12.27-29; cf. 1.14) enter God’s presence and worship together with the angels (esp. Heb 12.18-24). Even now they can boldly go where only Jesus has gone, before the very throne of God (Heb. 4.16). They must, therefore, persevere in their confession and, by so doing, push forward into the promised inheritance that Jesus’ work has made 11

For a similar account of this logic, particularly with a view to the new covenant promise in Jeremiah 31, see J.A. Whitlark, ‘Fidelity and New Covenant Enablement in Hebrews’ Getting “Saved”: The Whole Story of Salvation in the New Testament, C. H. Talbert and J. A. Whitlark(eds) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 72–91, esp. pp. 81–91.

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available to them. Instead of turning away as Israel did in the wilderness, they must follow the positive example of Jesus as well as others who acted in line with God’s promises even in the face of death (cf. Heb. 5.7-10, 11.1-12.2). In this way they will do the will of God by living in line with the reality they cannot yet see, but nevertheless confess to be true. All of this indicates that the coherence between one’s action/way of life with one’s confession about Christ lies at the heart of Hebrews’ understanding of pistis – faith or, perhaps better, faithfulness. Faith, by way of contrast to apistia and sin, orients one towards God. By faith one can do the will of God and move forward into the future he has promised for faith centres one’s focus beyond death and the limitations of the visible, temporal realm of this world (see esp. Heb 10.35–12.3. Faith thereby challenges the basic logic of the fear of death and of the guilt of impurity and strives instead to enter God’s rest. In the present world where the submission of all things to the Son’s rule is not yet fully seen, faith looks to Jesus, whom God led out of the dead (Heb. 13.20), and considers that, even when death and impurity seem to speak the final word, the one whose voice promises his children eternal life in his presence is faithful.

James The Epistle of James says surprisingly little about Jesus. Yet, like Hebrews and the other General Epistles, James links sin with actions that are inconsistent with or not properly oriented towards the eschatological judgement, hope of future life, and the Lord’s return (cf. Jas 1.12; 5.7-9).12 Unlike Hebrews, James’ more general or typical perspectives correlate with a broader conceptualization of sin.13 He therefore provides a partial catalogue of particular sins, but also roots these sins generally in the universal human desire (epithumia) that inclines towards objects of temptation and evil rather than towards God (Jas 1.14-15; 4.1-3). Also unlike Hebrews, this epistle shows no explicit interest in a sacrificial account of atonement for sin. Forgiveness of sins, which is barely mentioned in James, is linked with intercessory prayer and confession (Jas 5.15-16), and with the 12

13

For a thorough discussion of the eschatological framework of the epistle see T. C. Penner, The Epistle of James and Eschatology: Re-reading an Ancient Christian Letter (JSNTSup 121; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996). Richard Bauckham, who argues that the epistle is an encyclical, comments: ‘We must take seriously the implication that James addresses not specific but typical situations, such as he knows it is quite likely his readers in many parts of the Diaspora might encounter, and rebukes typical failings, such as he might think likely to occur in many Jewish Christian communities in the Diaspora’ (R. J. Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage [London: Routledge, 1999], p. 26).



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bringing back of those who have wandered away (Jas 5.19-20). James does imply a connection between a conception of purity and nearness to God (Jas 4.8-10),14 but he says nothing about the specific ways that Jesus has made this possible. Instead, the emphasis in this letter rests on the need to live in line with heavenly wisdom and thereby control desires that incline one towards evil.15 James, like 1 Peter, also uses the concept of waiting patiently to receive God’s promises for describing the stance of the moral life (e.g. Jas 5.8) rather than developing a metaphor of moving forward, as in Hebrews. James identifies the root of sin in the human inclination towards evil. This identification of certain innate and disordered desires as the source of sin aligns closely with the Jewish concept of the ‘evil inclination’ (yeṣer hara).16 Thus, James avers, temptation does not come from God, but from the innate human inclination towards evil (Jas 1.13-15) and from the devil who appeals to it (Jas 4.7). The end result of following this inclination is death (Jas 1.15). In a central passage of the epistle (Jas 313-4.11), James warns his readers that to live in line with disordered desires such as selfish ambition, covetousness, envy and pride (Jas 3.14, 16; 4.1-6) is to accept the wisdom or logic of the world and its values (Jas 3.14-16). This path disrupts relationships, is opposed by God, and will eventually issue in destruction when the judgement comes (e.g. Jas 4.1-6, 11-12). Faith turns one instead towards God and the wisdom that comes from heaven (Jas 3.13, 17-18). The fruits of such living may not be easily recognized in the present, but the eschatological orientation of faith understands that present comforts are fleeting (Jas 1.10-11; 5.1-5). Faith assures one of fellowship with God, blessing in the coming judgement, and the reward for living in line with heavenly wisdom (e.g. Jas 1.12; 3.18; 4.6-10; 5.7-8). As noted above, James details a number of particular expressions of sin. Chief among them are instability of mind and character, and doubt in relation 14

15

16

There may well be a deeper sacrificial logic underlying the use of purity language here (see e.g. Bauckham, James, pp. 146–7, 165). On the theme of purity in James see also Darian Lockett’s recent study. Lockett argues that one of James’ main uses of purity categories is to help identify and delimit boundaries that shape the readers’ identity and help keep them separate/distinct from their surrounding culture (D. R. Lockett, Purity and Worldview in the Epistle of James [LNTS 366; London: T&T Clark, 2008]). This also coheres well with aspects of 1 Peter (see below). Bauckham suggests that the ‘law of freedom’ (Jas 1.25; 2.12) language in James is related to the notions of ‘birth by the word of truth’ (Jas 1.18) and the ‘implanted word’ (Jas1.21). Thus the power to control passion and so not to sin does not come from within, but from above, that is, from the salvific work of God (James, 146). For a different account, as well as a thorough summary of interpretative views, see Allison, James, pp. 311–16. See esp. J. Marcus, ‘The Evil Inclination in the Epistle of James’, CBQ 44 (1982): 606–21; Allison, James, pp. 246–8; J. Neusner, ‘Sin, Repentance, Atonement and Resurrection: The Perspective of Rabbinic Theology on the Views of James 1–2 and Paul in Romans 3–4’, The Missions of James, Peter, and Paul: Tensions in Early Christianity, B. Chilton and C. Evans(eds) (NovTSupp 115; Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 409–34, here p. 431.

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to God. These themes explicitly occur at the beginning of the letter (Jas 1.6-8) and again at the end where James speaks of sinners being prone to wander away from God and the community (Jas 5.19-20). Implicit references to the problem of instability, however, run through the epistle both in its discussions of the need to persevere in the midst of trials and temptations (e.g. Jas 1.2-4 12; 4.7-8) and in its emphasis on consistency and coherence in one’s life between faith and what one says and does (e.g. Jas 1:22-24; 2.1; 3.10-12). Maturity or perfection (teleios) in James is primarily about living with integrity – living in a way that is consistent with one’s eschatological hope.17 The implication seems to be that because the mature are more settled and stable in their faith, they have greater control over their passions and thus are less prone to sin. The body of the epistle proceeds by way of a series of loosely structured discussions that generally relate to two major categories of sin: improper speech and improper use of wealth in relation to self and those in need (Jas 1.26-27). Taking the last element first James 2.1-13 demonstrates that privileging and pandering to the wealthy dishonours the poor in the context of the congregation and is sin (Jas 2.9). To show such partiality or favouritism is to live in line with the inclination towards evil and with the logic and values of the world and its shortsighted orientation towards the present life. Genuine faith – the kind that is oriented towards and assured of future salvation – does not simply wish the poor well, but uses wealth to provide for their needs (Jas 2.14-26). This kind of living is in line with the command to love the neighbour (Jas 2.8). Wealth used only for one’s own aggrandizement, especially at the expense of the poor, will soon rot away. Those who sin in this way will find no ultimate security in their wealth and can expect one day to face divine judgement (Jas 5.1-6). James 3.1-12 and 4.11-17 especially focus on the ways that disordered desire issues in sinful speech. The tongue, James says, is one of the main conduits through which evil desire is actualized in the world. The tongue, though a small part of the body, is a portal or tool for evil desire and can influence the course of one’s entire life. The tongue can be used to bless, but also to curse (Jas 3.9), speak evil of others (Jas 3.11) and express arrogance through boasting (Jas. 4.16). Thus controlling the tongue is a central feature of standing firm in temptation and resisting the evil inclination. In sum, throughout James sin is identified as the outcome of being controlled by desire that inclines towards evil. This leads to instability, doubt 17

For a detailed defence of this view see P. J. Hartin, A Spirituality of Perfection: Faith in Action in the Letter of James (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999).



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and double-mindedness. Those who live in this immature/imperfect way value and misuse wealth, cannot control their tongues, and are prone to wander away from God and the community of believers. Faith, by contrast, orients one towards God and the coming judgement, with both its potential punishments and rewards. This orientation enables one to endure trials and temptation and to resist the devil, in short, to control the inclination towards evil. Such living is counterintuitive relative to the values of the here and now. Instead of speaking from envy and selfish ambition, heavenly wisdom enables gentle, peaceable and merciful speech and action. Instead of hoarding wealth or pandering to the wealthy, faith shares with those who have needs and by so doing obeys God by loving the neighbour. James may say little explicitly about Jesus, but the wisdom from above that he emphasizes repeatedly echoes the wisdom that Jesus spoke about and embodied when he proclaimed the kingdom of God.18

1 Peter 1 Peter addresses itself to congregations of believers characterized as part of the Jewish diaspora. Like Hebrews, the letter depicts its readers as already having heard the word of God – the good news about Jesus – from others. Because they accepted this word, they have been born anew (1 Pet. 1.3, 22-25). They have also been baptized (1 Pet. 3.21). Moreover, the letter appears to be directed largely at gentile believers whose identity is being redescribed in terms of the language and symbols of Israel (1 Pet. 1.1-2; 2.5-9).19 Although they once were not a people, through Jesus they have been incorporated into God’s people such that they themselves can now be said to live among the gentiles (esp. 1 Pet. 2.10-12; cf. 4.3-4). Salvation in 1 Peter, as in Hebrews, involves obtaining an inheritance that one looks forward to receiving when Jesus is revealed in the near future (e.g. 1 Pet. 1.3-5, 13; 4.7). The orienting concept in this letter differs, however, from that of Hebrews. While Hebrews generally develops a directional metaphor which casts the moral life in terms of moving forward into the promised inheritance, Peter, like James, encourages patience while one waits for the inheritance to be revealed. In keeping with Hebrews and James, 1 Peter exhorts his readers to live in a way that is consistent with this future hope and the reality of the coming 18 19

See esp. Bauckham, James, pp. 29–108. See P. J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter: A Commentary on First Peter (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), pp. 50–1, 69–72.

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judgement (1 Pet. 1.13-17). Faith and hope are properly oriented towards God and have Jesus’ resurrection as their proper ground (1 Pet. 1.21). All of this means that, much like James, the disordered desires or passions (epithumiai, 1 Pet. 1.14; 2.11; 4.2–3) that controlled one’s life in the past must now themselves be controlled. Indeed, 1 Peter also seems to root sin in the passions, and makes a passing reference to the agency of the devil and the need to resist him (1 Pet. 5.8–9). In view of the coming judgement (1 Pet. 1.17; 4.4-5), a life enslaved to the passions is a life lived in ‘ignorance’ (agnoia, 1 Pet. 1.14) and characterized as ‘futile conduct’ (mataia anastrophē, 1 Pet. 1.18). In 1 Peter love in the community covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4.8; cf. Jas 5.20), which likely means that sin in the context of the community can be eradicated when people act lovingly toward each other.20 1 Peter, however, goes beyond James in its more explicit emphasis on sin being at odds with the salvation Jesus has accomplished and the believer’s resulting new identity, an identity which includes priestly associations. Thus, in language reminiscent of God’s redemption of his people from slavery in Egypt (e.g. Exod. 6.6; Deut. 78), the audience has been redeemed (elutrōthēte) by Jesus’ blood from their futile ways (1 Pet. 1.18-19).21 Moreover, the contrast in 1 Peter between being led by passions/desires on the one hand, and obedience that enacts divine holiness (1 Pet. 1.14-16) on the other, is linked with the identity Peter attributes to and inculcates within the readers. Already in the mention of Jesus’ sprinkled blood (1.2) one detects resonances with the covenant inauguration ceremony at the altar (e.g. Exod. 24.3-8).22 The initial blessing of ‘grace’ and ‘peace’ (1.2) followed closely by a reference to God’s ‘mercy’ (1 Pet. 1.3) calls to mind the special priestly blessing of God’s people (cf. Num. 6.22-27). Further, in language replete with allusions to the temple and its service, the readers are called living stones being built into a spiritual house, and a holy and royal priesthood who offer spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus (1 Pet. 25, 9). It is unsurprising, therefore, to find Peter using holiness and purity language with reference to the letter’s recipients (e.g. 1 Pet. 1.2, 15, 22; 3.2, 15). Thus, to continue to submit to the passions is to sin and to live in a way that directly challenges and contrasts with one’s identity as a Christian.23 20 21

22 23

See J. R. Michaels, 1 Peter (WBC 49; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1988), p. 247. See the recent and thorough discussion of the influence of Passover/Exodus themes here in M. Williams, The Doctrine of Salvation in the First Letter of Peter (SNTSM 149; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 85–97 (cf. G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible [London: Duckworth, 1980], p. 156). For a contrasting opinion see Achtemeier, 1 Peter, pp. 128–9. See e.g. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, 88–9; Michaelis, 1 Peter, pp. 12–13. 1 Pet. is one of only two NT books to use this term (1 Pet. 4.16; cf. Acts 11.26; 26.38).



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While a clear connection exists between holy living and the reader’s reception of the future blessings and salvation (e.g. 1 Pet. 1.14-17; 3.9-12), Peter also stresses the need for insiders to be holy/avoid sin as a witness to outsiders. To sin is not only to disobey God, but to live among the gentiles just like the gentiles live, with no discernible difference. Living in accordance with God’s will, by contrast, sets one apart and will be noticed by outsiders (1 Pet. 2.11-12, 15; 3.16; 4.2-4). Holiness and priestly identity mean that one is/must be different, set apart from the norms, logic and values of the world. Sin in 1 Peter, then, is action that issues from being under the control of the inclination towards evil. Such living neither aligns with the holiness of one’s new priestly identity, nor takes seriously the future judgement wherein sinners and the righteous alike will receive the rewards for the ways they have lived (e.g. 1 Pet. 1.9, 13, 17; 4.17-18). The power of God that guards his people (1 Pet. 1.5) and Jesus’ redeeming work that frees them from ignorant and futile living (1 Pet. 1.18-19) mean that now they can separate themselves from such behaviours and live by the example that Jesus himself set for them (1 Pet. 2.21-23). To fail to do so is to submit again to sin and deny one’s new identity.

2 Peter and Jude The very close similarities between sections of 2 Peter and Jude have long been noted. Most modern commentators conclude that 2 Peter has used Jude as a source.24 As with the other General Epistles, both of these letters are written to congregations of insiders (cf. 2 Pet. 1.1-8; Jude 1-3). 2 Peter, in keeping with all the texts discussed here, envisions judgement and full salvation as something yet to come and thus as determinative for how one lives now (2 Pet. 3.10-14, 17; cf. 1.11). While less developed, hints of this same perspective are present in Jude as well (Jude 14–15, 20–21, 24). Sin in these two texts is linked with specific individuals against whom both authors warn their readers. These sinful persons appear to be members of the communities addressed by the letters. Thus, they participate in the communal feasts (2 Pet. 2.13; Jude 12). 2 Peter describes them as people who started out on the right path, forsook sin, and learned about Jesus (2 Pet. 2.15, 20-22). Now, however, they are known to be ‘false teachers’ (2 Pet. 2.1). Jude characterizes 24

For a succinct discussion of the options and for support of this view see R. J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (WBC 50; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983), pp. 141–3.

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such people somewhat differently, suggesting that they were intentionally deceptive from the beginning; they have ‘snuck in’ (pereisedusan) among the congregation (Jude 4). Whatever their original motives for joining with the community of believers were, both letters agree that they now deny Jesus in some way (2 Pet. 2.1; Jude 4). This probably means that their sinful acts, which are inconsistent with their claims to be believers, are tantamount to a denial of Jesus.25 Both letters detail a number of sinful attitudes and actions that characterize these individuals. Chief among their faults are sexual sin and greed (2 Pet. 2.2-10; cf. Jude 4, 6–7, 11–12, 16). 2 Peter says that they use their position in the community to lead others into sexual sin (2 Pet. 2.14, 18-19). Their greed leads them to promote themselves and seek only their own gain (2 Pet. 2.14-15; cf. Jude 11–12, 16). Further, they have no respect for authorities and angelic figures (2 Pet. 2.10; Jude 8–10). Both letters agree that they also spread dissension in the community (2 Pet. 2.1; Jude 19). They twist God’s grace into licence to justify there sinful behaviours (Jude 4; cf. 2 Pet. 2.19). Somewhat like James and 1 Peter, the sins of such people are linked with the unrestrained influence of their passions (epithumiai, 2 Pet. 3.3; Jude 16, 18). Moreover, they appeal to the passions of others in order to lead them into sin and enslave them, even as they themselves are enslaved (2 Pet. 2.14, 18-19, cf. 2.2-3). 2 Peter and Jude, again like the other General Epistles, identify those who follow their passions as unstable people. Thus, 2 Peter compares them to mists driven around by a storm (2 Pet. 2.17). Jude likens them to clouds or waves whipped up and driven along by the wind (Jude 12–13). Those whom they try to entice are also ‘unstable souls’ (psuchas astēriktous, 2 Pet. 2.14). The end that awaits them is destruction (2 Pet. 2.3; 3.7; cf. Jude 5–7, 13). Unlike the other texts discussed here, however, the sin mentioned in 2 Peter appears to have flourished in part because Jesus had not yet returned.26 Thus, 2 Peter suggests a connection between the sinful behaviour of these individuals and their doubts about Jesus’ coming (2 Pet. 3.3-4). 2 Peter also emphasizes the fact that while from a human perspective Jesus’ return and the final judgement has not happened as quickly as expected, God is not slow to fulfil his promises, since time for God is different than for humans (2 Pet. 3.8-9). It seems that 25

26

See e.g. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, pp. 40, 241; cf. S. Hafemann, ‘Salvation in Jude 5 and the Argument of 2 Peter 1:3-11’, The Catholic Epistles and Apostolic Tradition: A New Perspective on James to Jude, eds K.-L. Niebuhr and R. L. Wall (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 331–42, here p. 339. See e.g. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, esp. pp. 154–6, 294–5; M. Dejardins, ‘The Portrayal of the Dissidents in 2 Peter and Jude: Does it Tell us More About the “Godly” than the “Ungodly”?’ JSNT 30 (1987): 89–102, here pp. 98–9.



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those in these communities who are again allowing their passions to dominate them have fallen prey to temptation in part because, having waited for Jesus to return for what seemed to them to be an inordinate amount of time, they no longer have the faith or confidence to continue in their commitment to fight the passions and the logic of gratification in the here and now. Their faith is being challenged by the quotidian reality of life that continues apace and, rather than looking to the ways God has judged and fulfilled promises in the past, their passions have regained control of them.

Conclusion While each of the texts studied above has its own voice, they share a number of assumptions about sin. They more or less agree that sin follows from elevating the logic and values of one’s present experience of the world above those that God has revealed in Scripture and also in the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. By contrast, faithful living in the last days separates one from the wider culture by orienting one towards the world to come. They also agree that sin is the outworking of disordered desires. For Hebrews this is primarily linked with fear of death and guilt. In the General Epistles, especially James, the failure to control this impulse and instead be controlled by it results in sinful acts. Sin, all these letters agree, leads one away from God and causes fractures in the community of believers. Instead of inheriting the blessings God has promised, sin, according to each of these texts, results ultimately in judgement and destruction.

Part II

Historical Figures

8

Classic Rabbinic Perspectives Michael Graves

I will begin by explaining briefly the contribution an essay on ‘Classic Rabbinic Perspectives’ on the doctrine of sin can make to a volume dedicated to exploring this topic from a Christian vantage point. First, it should be noted that the material covered in this chapter does not serve as the background for New Testament theology. The roots of Rabbinic Judaism stretch back to ancient Israel and Jewish life in the Second Temple period, but the sources we will be considering come from a later time. The classic documents of Rabbinic Judaism include the Mishnah (redacted c. 225 ce) and related tannaitic literature,1 the two Talmuds and related amoraic literature (c. 225–600 ce),2 and later homiletical compilations, commentaries and philosophical texts from the Middle Ages. These sources do not present the background to early Christian views, but an alternative theological trajectory parallel to the Christian Church Fathers and medieval theologians. The benefits for Christian readers in considering this tradition are many. Beyond the important benefit of greater understanding and appreciation of our neighbour, Christian readers can learn from rabbinic sources an alternative construal of the doctrine of sin built out of shared biblical texts (the ‘Hebrew 1

2

The rabbinic sages active from the first century ce to the redaction of the Mishnah are called Tannaim. Other documents composed primarily of tannaitic material include the Tosefta (a collection of legal traditions similar to the Mishnah), and early midrashim such as the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael on Exodus, Sifra on Leviticus, Sifre to Numbers, and Sifre to Deuteronomy. Rabbinic texts will be abbreviated in this essay following H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. and ed. M. Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). The central Jewish document from this period is the Babylonian Talmud (redacted probably c. 650 ce), which contains commentary on the Mishnah often elaborated through narratives, biblical citations and dialectical reasoning. The Jews living in the land of Israel also produced a more concise commentary on the Mishnah called the Palestinian Talmud (or Talmud Yerushalmi). The Sages cited in these documents lived primarily between 225 and 500 ce and are called Amoraim. Midrash collections that cite traditions of these Sages include Genesis Rabbah, Lamentations Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah and Pesikta de-Rab Kahana.

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Bible’ or ‘Old Testament’). This can lead to fresh insights for Christians and can also bring Christian theological distinctives into clearer focus. Obviously, one cannot present anything close to a comprehensive description of rabbinic perspectives on the doctrine of sin in a single essay. The brevity of this treatment and the limitations of the author make certain that this essay will provide only a small and imperfect sample of material. But I have endeavoured to cover as many of the key topics as possible in the space allotted. An important point to emphasize in considering this material is that Rabbinic Judaism never formulated a systematic theological statement about sin. The intellectual framework for Jewish identity was located in the area of practice (halakhah) rather than in the sphere of theological dogmatics. Classical Jewish reflection on the nature of sin generally came in the form of aggadah, that is, stories, parables, reflections on Scripture, aphorisms, prayers and other non-analytical modes of discourse. Within the boundaries of certain shared values, considerable freedom of thought was allowed on theological topics, and differing ideas were sometimes permitted to stand side by side. As one scholar explained with respect to the diverse aggadot dealing with human merit before God: ‘The Sages were neither moral philosophers nor metaphysicians as we today understand these designations, but in the doctrine of “merit” they were trying to reconcile a variety of grand metaphysical and ethical issues.’3 Rabbinic theology is not systematic, but ‘resembles rather a complicated arrangement of theological checks and balances’, intended to account for all of reality as it is experienced, so as to nourish a religion that works in real life.4 The goal of this essay will be to identify key values that underlie rabbinic reflection on sin and also to explore the various theological checks and balances found within the aggadah.5 3

4

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Steven T. Katz, ‘Man, Sin, and Redemption in Rabbinic Judaism’, in The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. S. T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 931. Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, with a new introduction by Neil Gillman (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1993; originally, New York: Macmillan, 1909), p. 17. Cf. Hyam Maccoby, The Philosophy of the Talmud (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 37: ‘It is not unusual with the Talmud to give two opposite views of a troubling question, thereby providing a dialectical basis for some deeper synthesis.’ Although classical rabbinic texts exhibit a certain unity of thought, it is not the case that all rabbinic documents have been edited so as to be in complete harmony with each other on such a fine point as the doctrine of sin. Ideally, a study of this kind would need to analyse, for example, how the Mishnah deals with various aspects of sin, and Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, and so forth, ascertaining the various contributions of the individual documents to this topic before moving on to present a synthetic picture. In the present context this is impossible. Yet, in drawing on various rabbinic texts for this essay, I will attempt to organize discussions with an awareness of possible differences between documents, and I will emphasize diversity where it exists so as to capture the particular contributions of different rabbinic works. See Jacob Neusner, Building Blocks of Rabbinic Tradition:



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Sin as Rebellion Against God’s Rule A fundamental concept in rabbinic theology is God’s rule as King or Master of the world.6 Consequently sin is viewed as rebellion against God’s rule.7 God will be king over Israel even when they are scattered among the nations (Sifra, behuqotai, pereq 8 (112b), citing Ezek. 20.33), and the rabbinic paradigm of a sinner is one who rejects God’s lordship (Sifra, behuqotai, parashah 2 (111b); GenR 23.7; 26.4). The three primary words for sin in the Hebrew Bible, ḥṭʼ (fault or misdeed, intentional or otherwise), pš‘ (intentional transgression), and ‘wn (iniquity against God) are generally employed by the Rabbis in keeping with their biblical usages, and as in later biblical literature they can function as synonyms.8 On Leviticus 16.21 Sifra defines ḥṭʼ as unintentional sin, ‘wn as conscious or presumptuous sin, and pš‘ as rebellion against God (Sifra, ahare mot, parashah 2 (80d)). Rebelling against God’s rule may be described as throwing off the Yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven (e.g. m.Ber 2.2; Ber 13a–14b; cf. San 111b). Early rabbinic sources separate the issue of ritual impurity from the notion of sin. Ritual impurity is seen as an unavoidable part of life, and therefore not as rebellion against God. In general, ritual impurity is not deemed ‘sinful’, and ritual purification does not play a halakhic role in atoning for sin.9 In keeping with biblical texts such as Leviticus 18.24-30 and 20.1–3, the language of ritual ‘defilement’ could be used to describe conscious sin against God, but this belonged to the sphere of aggadah and served to teach moral lessons.10 For example, it is stated that murder defiles the land, causes the Divine Presence to depart, and destroys the temple (Sifre Num 161). Emphasis is placed on moral forms of disobeying God, and the effect of disobedience is punishment rather than the need for ritual atonement.11

6

7

8

9

10 11

The Documentary Approach to the Study of Formative Judaism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), p. 13. E.g. in Ber 40b, mention of God’s kingship is second only to mention of God’s name as a requirement for saying a proper benediction. This tradition developed into what became the familiar formula, ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe …’; see Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. R. P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia: JPS, 1993), pp. 5–6. Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, pp. 219–20. Other metaphors are used to describe sin, e.g. sin as ‘folly’ (Sot 3a); but ‘rebellion’ is the most pervasive and foundational image. Alan J. Avery-Peck, ‘Sin in Judaism’, in The Encyclopaedia of Judaism, 2nd edn, ed. J. Neusner, A. J. Avery-Peck and W. S. Green (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 4:2475–6. Rabbinic texts also make regular use of the term ‘byrh for ‘transgression, sin’. Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 93–117. Ibid., pp. 118–34. E.g. Sanh 107b, 109a. Ibid., pp. 127–8. Cf. m.Abot 5.9.

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Numerous sins are condemned in rabbinic literature. For three sins, namely idolatry, unchastity and murder, one is advised to avoid them even to the point of suffering death (Sanh 74a; cf. p.Sanh 3.6, 21b).12 Violence and robbery are identified as great evils (GenR 31.6; Sanh 108a; BQ 119a). Within the homiletical mindset of the aggadah, even lesser sins may be condemned in the strongest terms; for example, jealousy, lust and ambition remove one from the world (m.Abot 4.21), committing adultery with one’s eyes makes one an adulterer (LevR 23.12), dishonest insincerity and foolish speech make one worthy of Gehenna (Sot 41b; Shab 33a), and shaming one’s neighbour forfeits one’s share in the world to come (BM 59a). Hatred could be seen as an all-encompassing sin. In one aggadah, the Second Temple was destroyed as punishment for hatred, which was regarded as equal in magnitude to idolatry, unchastity and murder (Yoma 9b; cf. Arak 16b).

Freedom of the Human Will Human beings are morally obligated to submit to God’s rule, but in rabbinic thought they are granted the capacity to choose either to obey or disobey God’s commands. Freedom of the human will is ‘an elemental feature of the rabbinic universe’.13 As expressed in a saying of R. Akiba, ‘Everything is foreseen, yet power to choose (ršwt) is given. With goodness the world is judged, and everything according to the majority of one’s deeds’ (m.Abot 3.15).14 This exemplifies the Sages’ customary affirmation of both complete divine foreknowledge and human freedom of choice.15 One explanation for why God created all people from one person is so that neither the righteous nor the wicked could blame their ancestors for their behaviour (Sanh 38a). In fact, God created every person as a unique mixture, in part heavenly and in part earthly: ‘If a person performs Torah and does the will of his Father in heaven, then he is like the creatures above, as it is said, “I said, you are gods and all of you are sons of the Most High” (Ps. 82.6), but if a person does not perform Torah or do the will of his Father in heaven, then he is like the creatures below, as it is said, “Yet you will 12 13 14

15

In p.Peah 1.1, 15d, slander is included in this list together with idolatry, unchastity and murder. Katz, ‘Man, Sin, and Redemption in Rabbinic Judaism’, p. 926. All translations in this essay are mine. Hanoch Albeck, The Mishnah: Seder Nezikin (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1988), p. 367, explains ršwt (‘power, control’): ‘power is in the hands of humanity to choose either good or evil.’ For further discussion, see Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah, trans. G. Tucker (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 216–17, who sees another stream of rabbinic thought (that of R. Ishmael) that places less emphasis on human freedom.



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die like Adam” (Ps. 82.7)’ (Sifre Deut 306).16 The notion of human freedom arose naturally in Sifre to Deuteronomy in light of passages such as Deuteronomy 11.26-28 and 30.15-20 (‘Behold, I have set before you this day … a blessing and a curse … ‘life and good, death and evil’).17 The midrash interprets these texts in conjunction with Genesis 4.7: ‘If you do well, will you not be forgiven? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it’ (see Sifre Deut 54). Genesis 4.7 served as a key proof that God granted people the ability either to obey God or to follow sin. Human freedom and the responsibility that comes with it are frequently addressed in rabbinic texts. For example, it is said in the Talmud that God created a portion for every person both in the Garden of Eden and in Gehenna, but the portion we actually inherit is determined by whether our deeds are righteous or wicked (Ḥag 15a). An often-cited principle in the Talmud is that ‘everything is in the hands of Heaven, except the fear of Heaven’ (e.g. Ber 33b; Meg 25a; Nid 16b), in other words, God determines the circumstances we encounter in the world, but whether or not we choose to follow God is within our power. A tradition is related in the Talmud that argues from the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings that a person is allowed to follow whatever path he ‘desires’ (rwṣh) to follow (Mak 10b).18 To be sure, God is often said to give aid to those who make an effort (see below). But belief that help comes from God does not detract from the usual idea that humans are able and responsible to take the first steps toward keeping God’s commands. Whereas a person cannot choose to become a priest or Levite because these are based strictly upon family line, the capacity to become righteous is available to anyone, even a Gentile, who wishes to love God and seek righteousness (Midr Ps 146.7). Maimonides offered this clear statement on human freedom: Power of decision (ršwt) is given to every person. If a person wishes to incline himself to a good path and be righteous, the power of decision is in his hand. And if a person wishes to incline himself to an evil path and be wicked, the power of decision is in his hand … If God had decreed for a person that he 16

17

18

On humanity’s likeness to both the angels and the beasts, see GenR 8.11; 14.3; 67.3; Hag 16a. In GenR 67.3, it is made explicit that humans have ‘control’ (ršwt) over their mouths either to recite Torah or to slander, over their hands either to give charity or to steal, and over their feet either to go to synagogues and study halls or else to go to theatres and circuses. See also the interpretation of Gen. 3 through the language of Deuteronomy in GenR 21.5: ‘The Holy Blessed One set before him (i.e. Adam) two ways, the way of life and the way of death, and he selected for himself the other way (i.e. the way of death).’ E.g. this is shown from the Torah by juxtaposing God’s forbidding and then allowing Balaam to go with the Moabites (see Num. 22.12, 20), from the Prophets by interpreting Isa. 48.17 to say that God leads you in the way that you (i.e. choose to) go, and from the Writings by quoting Prov. 3.34.

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should be either righteous or wicked … why would He command to us through the prophets, ‘Do this!’ or ‘Do not do that!’, ‘Make good your ways!’ or ‘Do not follow after your wickedness!’, if from the beginning of a person’s creation his path was already decreed for him? … By what justice and fairness would the wicked be punished and the righteous rewarded? Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice? (Gen. 18.25).19

Rabbinic thinking about the nature of sin flows from belief in God’s just rule of the world and also the God-given capacity of people to make choices about whether to recognize God’s rule in their actions. ‘It is true that man has a tendency to lie, to make war and voraciously to pursue the material and the sensual. Yet it is just as true that he is capable of pursuing deeds of lovingkindness and justice, and to aspire to holy and spiritual things in life … If man does have a tendency to do evil, it is more significant that he has the capacity to do good.’20

The Two Inclinations According to Genesis 6.5, the ‘inclination’ (yṣr) of humanity’s thoughts were only evil all the time (cf. Gen. 8.21; Deut. 31.21). The term ‘inclination’ could also be used in a neutral or positive sense (e.g. 1 Chron. 28.9; 29.18). From biblical usages such as these there developed in rabbinic thought the idea that God created humanity with two inclinations: an inclination towards evil (yṣr hr‘) and an inclinations towards good (yṣr hṭwb).21 Of the two inclinations, the evil inclination receives more attention. A wellknown story suggests that the evil inclination takes effect in a person at the moment of birth, which is explained either through Genesis 8.21 (GenR 34.10), or else through the phrase ‘sin is crouching at the door’ (Sanh 91b; see Gen. 4.7).22 The evil inclination can be identified with Satan and the Angel of Death (BB 16a; cf. Suk 52a for seven identifications). Serving the evil inclination is likened to serving an idol, a foreign god that people must not worship (p.Ned 9.1, 41b;

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Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah, Ch. 5. For the text, see Eliyahu Touger, Maimonides Mishneh Torah: Hilchot Teshuvah, The Laws of Repentance (New York: Maznaim, 1987), pp. 114–24. Chaim Pearl, Theology in Rabbininc Stories (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), pp. 17–18. See GenR 14.4; Ber 61a, where one opinion grounds the creation of humanity with two inclinations in the two occurrences of the letter yod in wyyṣr (‘formed’) at Gen. 2.7. See also Targ Ps-Jon Gen. 2.7: ‘The Lord God created humanity with two inclinations.’ Cf. p.Ber 3.5, 6b, which asserts that children can have evil thoughts from the time they enter the world, citing Gen. 8.21.



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cf. Shab 105b; see Ps. 81.9). The function of the evil inclination is to dissuade people from fulfilling commandments, as opposed to the good inclination, which encourages people to keep commandments (ExodR 36.3). On Ecclesiastes 4.13, the ‘poor but wise child’ is interpreted as the good inclination, which is wise because it teaches the right way to live, poor because few people heed it, and a child because it comes into full force only at the age of thirteen, whereas the ‘old but foolish king’ is the evil inclination, which is foolish because it teaches evil, a king because all heed it, and old because it joins itself to a person from birth (EcclR 4.13). In this way of thinking, the evil inclination is in full force naturally, while the good inclination takes effect only when the moral conscious has been properly equipped with Torah (age thirteen), which is a remedy for the evil inclination, a fire that allows one to recast the evil inclination into good (ARN 16). The evil inclination is said to begin by provoking people to smaller sins, and then eventually leads them to greater sins such as idolatry (Shab 105b) and murder (Sifre Deut 186–87). At first the evil inclination is thin like a spider’s web, but later it becomes strong like a ship’s rope; likewise, it begins as a visitor, stays as a house guest, and eventually becomes master of the house (GenR 22.6; cf. Sanh 99b; Suk 52a–b). Transgressing one commandment often leads to another transgression, but it is just as true that obeying even a small commandment leads to further obedience (m.Abot 4.2). The general idea is that both sin and obedience are habit-forming. In keeping with the Rabbi’s general rejection of dualism, the creation of the evil inclination is normally ascribed to God. In one interpretation of Genesis 6.6, God regrets that he made the evil inclination because it caused humanity to rebel against Him (GenR 27.4).23 Yet, if there is the least suggestion that blame might fall on God so as to take moral responsibility away from people, this will be countered with a balancing assertion of human culpability. Thus, discussing Genesis 3.22 in connection with Ecclesiastes 7.29 (‘God made humanity upright’), Tanhuma states: ‘If you say, “Why did God create the evil inclination? It is written, ‘the inclination of the heart of humanity is evil from his youth’ (Gen. 8.21). You [O God] acknowledge that it is evil; if so, who is able to make it good?” The Holy Blessed One says, “You [humanity] are the one who makes it evil!”’ (Tan, bereshit, 7). The evil inclination is usually thought to have a stronger pull on people than the good inclination. On Ecclesiastes 9.14-15, the ‘great king’ is interpreted as 23

See also TanB, Noah, 4. In p.Taan 3.4, 66c, God regrets having made the Chaldeans, the Ishmaelites and the evil inclination. Suk 52b adds the Exile to this list of God’s regrets.

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the evil inclination who besieges people with sin, whereas the ‘poor wise man’ is the good inclination who delivers the city by repentance and good deeds. Yet, ‘no one remembered that same poor man’, showing that ‘when the evil inclination has control, a person does not remember the good inclination’ (Ned 32b). The evil inclination is said to abide hidden within the human heart (Suk 52a), and it can be affirmed that no one is perfectly righteous (San 101a, citing Eccl. 7.20). The Rabbis recognized people’s tendency to do wrong. Nevertheless, as we will see below, humans can resist the evil inclination. A realistic assessment of the human condition is found in the Talmudic opinion that most people (including most rabbinic Sages) are neither totally righteous nor totally wicked, but can sometimes be controlled by both inclinations (Ber 61b).24

Human Effort and Divine Aid in Resisting Sin On the one hand, it is generally assumed in rabbinic literature that humans are capable of resisting sin, as in the saying: ‘Who is mighty? The one who subdues his inclination’ (m.Abot 4.1, citing Prov. 16.32). The primary instrument given by God to aid the human will in resisting sin is Torah. ‘If you engage in words of Torah, the evil inclination will not rule over you; but if you neglect words of Torah, then the evil inclination will rule over you … its only concern is with you, but if you wish, you can rule over it’ (Sifre Deut 45, citing Gen. 4.7). The Torah is said to be the antidote to the evil inclination, but one must engage in Torah study to experience the benefit (Kid 30b; BB 16a). Elsewhere it is stated that those who engage in Torah and deeds of lovingkindness can master their evil inclination (AZ 5b; cf. m.Abot 1.2). One Talmud text encourages people to stir up their good inclination against their evil inclination, studying Torah, reciting the shema and remembering the day of their death (Ber 5a). A person can choose the good inclination over the evil (EcclR 9.2), and allow the good to rule over the evil (LevR 34.1; EcclR 9.7). Many classical rabbinic texts express the basic idea that the wicked are those under the power (ršwt) of their heart, whereas the righteous are those who have their heart under their power (GenR 34.10). 24

On rare occasions, the phrase yṣr hr‘ is used for humanity’s physical appetites and ambitions (see Louis Jacobs, A Jewish Theology [London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973], p. 244). On the sentence, ‘And behold, it was very good’ (Gen 1.31), it is asked how the yṣr hr‘ could be ‘very good’, and the response is given that without the yṣr hr‘ no one would build a house or have children (GenR 9.7; cf. Yoma 69b). In this sense of yṣr hr‘ it explained that loving God ‘with all your heart’ (Deut. 6.5) means ‘with both your inclinations’ (Sifre Deut 32).



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On the other hand, it is commonly expressed that humans need divine aid to resist sin and subdue the evil inclination. The Talmud makes this point using Psalm 37.32-33: ‘A person’s inclination rises up against him always and seeks to kill him, as it is said, “The wicked watches the righteous and seeks to kill him.” If it were not for the Holy Blessed One, who is his Helper, a person could not prevail over his inclination, as it is said, “The Lord will not leave him in his hand, nor will He condemn him when he is judged”’ (Suk 52b). This idea is also expressed clearly in rabbinic prayers that ask for God’s help, for example: ‘May it be your will, Lord my God and God of my Fathers, that you break and remove the yoke of the evil inclination from our hearts … It is evident and known to you that we do not have the strength to stand against it; but let it be your will, Lord my God and God of my Fathers, that you remove it from upon us and make it submit, so that we may do your will as our own will with a whole heart’ (p.Ber 4.2, 7d; cf. Ber 16b-17a, 60b). The requirement of human effort and the necessity of divine aid are best reconciled by imagining that people must take the first steps toward obedience and that God responds by providing the requisite assistance. This is expressed well by the saying: ‘Why is it written, “Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he shows favour” (Prov. 3.34)? If a person comes to defile himself, an opening is given to him; but if a person comes to purify himself, help is given to him’ (Shab 104a). In the world to come, God will root out the evil inclination from within people (SongR 1.2.4, citing Jer. 31.33 and Ezek. 36.26; GenR 48.11; TanB, ki tissa, 13; TanB, Vayyiqra, 12). People are to chisel away at the evil inclination throughout their lives until God someday removes it from the human heart (PRK 24.17, citing Ezek. 36.26; cf. NumR 15.16).25 A modern Jewish statement of classical rabbinic thinking on this topic recognizes human capacity and also the need for outside assistance: ‘The rabbinic conception is that human beings possess moral faculties naturally, but that these are somewhat weak and easily perverted, and require guidance in order to function well.’26 Michael Fishbane speaks of the human effort to act and to receive aid as the ‘cultivation of readiness’.27 ‘Such soul work proceeds with 25

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In PesR 41.4, the evil inclination was eliminated from the Israelites at Sinai when they first received the Torah; see Deut. 5.29, interpreted as: ‘Would that their heart would be like this always, fearing me and keeping all my commandments.’ If Israel at that time had asked to have the evil inclination removed permanently, God would have done so. But the people eventually allowed the evil inclination to return (see Deut. 29.3). Maccoby, The Philosophy of the Talmud, p. 53. For Maccoby, guidance comes primarily in the form of education. Michael Fishbane, Sacred Atunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 171.

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humility and repeated failure; for the heart is also dominated by diverse and unfocused instincts or forces. It longs for a healing beyond oneself; it longs for God to heal the fractured self and help guide it.’28

Archetypal Sin, but not Original Sin For most theological issues related to original sin, a variety of perspectives stand side by side in rabbinic literature.29 Perhaps the only consistent statement that can be made is that, although ideas related to Christian thinking about original sin appear throughout classical rabbinic sources, the ancient Sages did not hold viewpoints equivalent to the Christian doctrine of original sin. Some rabbinic texts speak of Adam’s sin or the human condition in a way that is reminiscent of original sin. On the phrase ‘their grapes are grapes of poison’ (Deut. 32.32), Sifre to Deuteronomy says: ‘You are sons of the first30 Adam, whom I punished with death, for him and for the generations that come after him, until the end of all generations’ (Sifre Deut 323). Speaking of the sin of the first Adam (ʼdm qdmwny), Sifra says: ‘See how many deaths were decreed for him and his generations, for all of his generations until the end of his generations’ (Sifra, Vayyiqra, perek 20 (27a)). It is sometimes said that Adam would have lived forever if he had not sinned (GenR 21.5; LevR 27.4). Some Sages told a theological fable in which Adam was created enormously tall and was reduced in height as a result of his sin, signifying in some way the impact of Adam’s sin on himself and his (regular-sized) descendants (Sanh 38b; 100a; PRK 1.1; 5.3; PesR 46.2). An interesting metaphor is used in explaining why Moses had to die: Moses was subject to death as a result of the sin in the Garden, just as a child who was born in prison is subject to imprisonment from the moment of his birth (EcclR 7.13, citing Deut. 31.14 and Gen. 3.22). But even in passages such as these where the aggadah sounds similar to Christian conceptions of original sin, the emphasis is different. Adam’s sin results in death for later generations, not a tainted moral nature or a proclivity to sin.31 The picture of Adam choosing sin and consequently suffering death fits the basic pattern of 28 29

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Ibid. ‘Rabbinic views on the subject (i.e. original sin) have the character of random, informal, and private opinions without dogmatic import whatever’ (Samuel S. Cohon, ‘Original Sin’, HUCA 21 [1948]: 296–7). The starting point for this midrash is that the word for ‘poison’ (rwš) in Deut. 32.32 resembles the word for ‘first’ (rʼšyt). An interesting and exceptional comment is found in David Qimchi’s commentary on Isaiah 43:27 (‘your first father sinned’): ‘And how is it that [you say] you have not sinned, since your first father



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rabbinic thinking about rewards and punishment.32 Rather than communicating a doctrine of original sin, certain rabbinic texts use Adam to symbolize the common experience of sin and death. Adam serves as an archetype of the human predicament.33 Moreover, other traditions in rabbinic literature point decidedly away from a doctrine of original sin. For example, emphasis can be placed on the sin of making the golden calf rather than on Genesis 3 as the archetypal sin that set Israel on the path to further rebellion (Sanh 102a; LamR 1.3; Tan, ki tissa, 21; ExodR 32.1).34 Alternatively, it can be stated that Adam brought sin to humanity but that Abraham came and put things right (GenR 14.6), or else that the giving of Torah at Sinai reversed for Israel the curse that came in the Garden of Eden (Yeb 103b). In one midrash, it is related that Adam could have simply repented and received pardon like all other people (see below), but that he only realized this after his expulsion from the Garden (GenR 22.13; PRK 24.11). In another midrash, the righteous come and rebuke the first Adam for having brought the decree of death against them, and Adam replies: ‘I only did one sin by my hand, and there is not any one of you who does not have on his hands many sins!’ It is then concluded that the righteous are indeed punished with death for their own sins, however slight, and that the first Adam is not responsible for them (TanB, hukkat, 39; cf. TanB, bereshit, 29). This last midrash appears to be a direct answer to a Christian view of original sin, perhaps as encountered in conversation with Christians or through hearing the Christian exposition of a text (e.g. Gen. 1–3 or Rom. 5). The same may also be said for passages where the Rabbis insist that God gave people pure souls, and He expects their souls to be returned in the same condition in which they were given, namely, pure and unspoiled by sin (LevR 18.1). As a general rule, classical rabbinic sources hold that God does not punish children for the sins of their fathers (cf. Exod. 20.5) unless the children follow in their fathers’ footsteps and commit their own sins (MRS 148; MRI, bahodesh, 6; Sanh 27b; Ber 7a; NumR 19.33, citing Deut. 24.16

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sinned? He is the first Adam; because humanity is sunk in sin (mwṭb‘ bḥṭʼ), for “the inclination of humanity’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen 8:21).’ Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. I. Abrahams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 430. ‘Our mortal selves are archetypally marked by “Adam,” a name which denotes a creature of the earth who lives and struggles with the complexity of choices’ (Fishbane, Sacred Atunement, p. 117). In another tradition, sin caused the Divine Presence to depart from the earth in seven stages: Adam’s sin, Cain’s sin, the generation of Enosh, the generation of the Flood, the generation of the Tower of Babel, the sin of Sodom, and the sinfulness of the Egyptians in Abraham’s day. The Divine Presence is then brought back down to earth in seven stages reaching from Abraham to Moses (GenR 19.7; NumR 13.2; SongR 5.1.1). No particular emphasis is placed on Adam’s sin as having a unique impact on the Divine Presence in the world.

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and Ezek. 18.20).35 Traditions and beliefs such as these led to a conception of sin that recognized a greater role for individual human agency than one typically finds in the Christian doctrine of original sin. Contemporary Jewish evaluations of the doctrine of original sin are uniform in their agreement that Jews do not believe in it. ‘Contrary to the concept of original sin, according to Rabbinic Judaism people do not have an inherited, corrupt nature.’36 The will of humanity is unfettered; people can misuse life’s opportunities, but there is no sense in which they must by nature do so.37 ‘In Judaism there is little or no concept of the notion of “original sin” which holds that man’s destiny is to sin unless he is saved by the grace of God … Man has a tendency to sin. But that is very different from the concept that he has a destiny to sin.’38 The fact that the Rabbis envisioned the evil inclination as a passing traveller shows that they did not see humanity in terms of a corrupted being.39 A passage in the Talmud that asserts that each person dies for his or her own sins and that only four lesser known individuals suffered because of the wickedness of the serpent may be taken as a rabbinic refutation of the Christian doctrine of sin.40 In Judaism, the act of sin puts one into the state of being a sinner in need of atonement (see below), but this does not corrupt the nature of the person. ‘Rabbinic Judaism rejected the notion of “original sin.” The Sages were emphatic on this point.’41 Because Rabbinic Judaism had no doctrine of original sin they did not require a saviour, but this does not mean that the Rabbis were optimistic in their expectations; the evil inclination is a powerful force from which no one is free.42 According to Lawrence Hoffman, Jews do not believe in original sin at the metaphysical level, but they do believe in ‘elemental sin’, the idea that sin is ‘a necessary element in human character’ at the psychological level.43 Jacob Neusner is willing to say that ‘man by nature is sinful’, but he adds that a person 35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

On the various perspectives on trans-generational punishment in the Hebrew Bible, see Bernard M. Levinson, Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Avery-Peck, ‘Sin in Judaism’, pp. 2477–8. A. Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1949), p. 95. Pearl, Theology in Rabbinic Stories, p. 18. See also C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 306: ‘The Rabbis did not propound any theory as to the corruption of man’s heart or the incapacity of man to do and be good without a preliminary regeneration.’ Loewe also notes that the rabbinic concept of zkwt ʼbwt (see below) can be seen as the Jewish antithesis to original sin (p. 219). Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, p. 262. See GenR 22.6; Suk 52a–b. Urbach, The Sages, pp. 427–9 (see Shab 55a–b). Katz, ‘Man, Sin, and Redemption in Rabbinic Judaism’, pp. 933–4. Jacobs, A Jewish Theology, pp. 246–7. Lawrence Hoffman, ‘From Penitence to Nobility: Modes of Jewish Piety’, in We Have Sinned: Sin and Confession in Judaism, Ashamnu and Al Chet, ed. L. A. Hoffman (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights,



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can know how to do good by encountering the Torah.44 All in all, rabbinic perspectives on sin touch on many of the same themes that are addressed in the Christian doctrine of original sin, but the Rabbis did not see a determinative connection between biblical archetypes of sin and the present human condition.

God’s Just and Gracious Rule: Punishments and Rewards The dominant view among the Rabbis was that God expresses his just rule over humanity by punishing sinful deeds and rewarding righteous deeds. ‘Numerous dicta, aphorisms, stories and parables were added by the Sages to those already found in the Bible in order to prove that the principle of “measure for measure” was not abolished.’45 An early saying captures this point: ‘Because the individual is judged based on the majority of his deeds and the world is judged based on the majority of its deeds, each person should always see himself as half innocent and half guilty. Blessed is the one who does one commandment, because he tips the balance for himself and for the world to the side of innocence. Woe to the one who commits one transgression, because he tips the balance for himself and for the world to the side of guilt’ (t.Kid 1.14; cf. m.Abot 4.11; Kid 40b). One of the reasons why God gave the Torah to Israel was because God wanted to grant merit (zkwt) to Israel for observing it (m.Mak 3.16; m.Abot 6.1; LevR 31.5-8; NumR 15.2). The idea is not that humans are equal to God and therefore able to compel him to reward righteous deeds. Rather, God has designed people so that they are able to do things worthy of God’s approval and for which God will reward them.46 Obviously, the realities of human existence problematize the notion that God consistently punishes sin and rewards right deeds in this life. The martyrdom

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2012), p. 16. Hoffman’s summary statement on the Christian doctrine is: ‘Whatever “original sin” is, we don’t believe it’ (p. 14). Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton, Classical Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: Comparing Theologies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), p. 192. See also Neusner’s reasoning based on rabbinic sources in The Theology of the Halakhah (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 129–31: the first Adam did not even spend the first Sabbath in Eden, but Israel constitutes a new moral entity that is meant to accomplish what Adam and Eve missed. Israel can do this through observing the Sabbath and the rest of the halakhah, and thus find atonement and recover the condition of Eden. God provided this opportunity by giving the Torah and granting humans the possibility of changing their nature. Urbach, The Sages, p. 439. Katz, ‘Man, Sin, and Redemption in Rabbinic Judaism’, p. 928. In p.Taan 3:10, 68c, Job 22:30 (‘through the cleanness of your hands’) is explained: ‘through the merits of the religious duties and the good deeds that were in your hands from the beginning.’

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of R. Akiba in the second century ce served as a paradigm example of the fact that reward and punishment are not always dispensed in accordance with justice in this life (Men 29b). A whole spectrum of solutions to this problem can be found in classical rabbinic sources (e.g. Kid 39b; Ber 5a; Ber 7a). Overall, the most common explanation for the incongruity between God’s justice and the unfairness of the world is that God will finally reward the righteous and punish the wicked in the afterlife (m.Abot 6.9; t.Peah 4.18; Taan 11a). As one Sage taught: ‘For each and every commandment written in the Torah that has the granting of its reward mentioned next to it, its reward is dependent on the resurrection of the dead’ (Kid 39b). Although the Rabbis believed that humans are punished for sin and acquire merit for right actions, they did not regard God as simply a neutral dispenser of justice.47 God does not desire that any of his creatures should be found guilty of sin (Tan, Vayyera, 8). The world is judged by the majority of its deeds, but also according to God’s goodness (m.Abot 3.15). Commenting on Daniel 12.2, both the Shammai and Hillel traditions assumed the existence of some people who are entirely wicked, some who are entirely righteous, and a third category (presumably the largest) of people in between. Whereas the Shammai position postulated that the ‘in between’ group will suffer temporarily in Gehenna in order to be refined and healed, the Hillel position asserted that God simply ‘inclines the decision towards mercy’ (t.San 13.3; RH 16b–17a). It was the Hillel tradition that served as the leading mode of thought. God was seen as leaning on the side of grace. Within the category of rewards we can mention the idea of the ‘merit of the Fathers’ (zkwt ʼbwt). The righteous deeds of Israel’s ancestors were seen as earning merit for their descendants (e.g. Sifre Deut 96; Ber 10b; Shab 30a; Ag. Ber., Ch. 10; LevR 2.11; ExodR 44.1, 3, 6, 9; Midr Ps 119.5). Key biblical prooftexts for this concept include Genesis 26.3-5, Exodus 20.56, 32.11-13, Leviticus 26.45, Deuteronomy 9.27, 2 Kings 13.23, 19.34, 20.3-6, 2 Chronicles 6.42, 21.7 and Isaiah 38.5, 55.3. Through ancestral merit Israel is said to attain atonement (DeutR 6.5), favour (GenR 29.5), deliverance (LevR 28.6; ExodR 1.36; Midr Ps 106.9) and other benefits, even for the whole world (LevR 26.5). Various views were expressed as to how far the ‘merit of the Fathers’ extended, with some suggesting that it was exhausted during biblical times, while others believed that the zkwt ʼbwt remains forever (Shab 55a; p.Sanh 10:1, 27d; m.Abot 2:2). The 47

The Rabbis criticized the ‘calculating Pharisee’ who attempts to pay off each sin by performing a commandment (p.Ber 9.5, 14b; p.Sot 5.7, 20c). Righteous action and avoidance of sin were not to be merely the result of cold calculation.



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Patriarchs were often singled out as meritorious ancestors,48 but other biblical characters were mentioned (e.g. Moses and David), and the righteous deeds of post-biblical persons could be seen as accruing merit for their descendants (p.MSh 5.5, 56d). This realm of aggadah was particularly flexible; for example, it can be stated that righteous parents bestow merit upon their children (Yoma 87a), but to guard against complacency it can also be said that a righteous father cannot deliver his son (San 104a). A single rabbinic text may report multiple views, some emphasizing the merit of the Fathers and others stressing the need for each person to fulfil the Torah (e.g. Shab 55a).49 The idea of the ‘merit of the Fathers’ was not a precise doctrine but a sense of dependence on the great figures of the past. According to one modern construal, the Jewish people are ‘the heirs of generations of character and wisdom (the ancestors, like “Abraham” or “Joseph”), who raise us beyond our earthly selves toward ideals of generosity and justice and filial piety’.50

Atonement: The Power of Repentance Rabbinic Judaism never abandoned the notion that God punishes and rewards people according to what they have done. But above their belief in judgement according to deeds, the Rabbis overlaid a theology of repentance as a way to address the fact that people are not as good as they should be. Being reconciled to God and others through repentance and its corresponding actions has been the dominant mode of thought in rabbinic piety.51 Repentance was seen as the foundational means by which human beings find atonement before God.52 In one key statement, repentance brings about atonement for lesser sins, and for greater sins repentance suspends punishment 48

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On the special case of the meritorious or atoning value of the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), see GenR 56.10; LevR 29.9; SongR 1.14.1; TanB, Vayyera, 46; and Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial, trans. J. Goldin (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1993; originally, New York: Behrman House, 1967). On the presence in rabbinic tradition side by side of both the merit of the Fathers and keeping commandments to gain one’s own merit, see Urbach, The Sages, pp. 497–8. Fishbane, Sacred Atunement, p. 118. Hoffman, ‘From Penitence to Nobility’, pp. 23–4. In general, good deeds belong to the system of rewards and punishment, whereas repentance is a means of atonement to address human failings. In aggadah, however, these elements can be treated together, because God has provided the occasions for both to benefit humanity; e.g. ‘Repentance and good deeds are like a shield against retribution’ (m.Abot 4.11). If one were speaking in Christian terms, it could be said that repentance is ‘the Jewish doctrine of salvation’; see G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 1:500. Repentance was the key to atonement before God, but reconciliation between people requires proper restitution (Sifra, ahare mot, pereq 8 (83a); m.Yoma 8:9).

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until the Day of Atonement, which effects atonement on the basis of repentance (m.Yoma 8.8; cf. Sifre Num 112; p.Yoma 8.7, 45b; Yoma 85b).53 The Sages argued that it was the Day itself that brought atonement on the Day of Atonement even if the sacrifices in the temple could no longer be performed, but repentance was an essential requirement.54 The central place of repentance in the efficacy of this event is reflected in the prayer used by R. Hamnuna on the Day of Atonement: ‘My God, before I was created I was unworthy, and now that I am created I am like those that are not created. I am dust in my living, how much the more in my dying. Behold, I am before You like a vessel full of shame and humiliation’ (Ber 17a). The power of repentance is a major theme in aggadic discourse throughout rabbinic literature. The ‘sacrifice of fools’ in Ecclesiastes 5.1 (4.17 Heb.) is said to be the offering of one who has not repented (Ber 23a). Great is repentance, because it brings healing to the world, reaches up to the throne of glory, overrides prohibitions in the Torah that might separate God from the penitent, brings about redemption, prolongs life and brings about the world’s redemption (Yoma 86a–b; cf. DeutR 2.24; PRE 43). Repentance is one of the seven things that preceded the creation of the world (GenR 1.4; PRE 3). The penitent is a new creature (p.RH 4.8, 59c; PesR 40.5), and may be considered better off than the one who never sinned (Ber 34b). Nothing can stand between a sinner and punishment except repentance, but once the sinner has repented the power of judgement cannot touch him (TanB, balak, 14). To repent is equal to building the temple and making sacrifices (PRK 24.5; LevR 7.2). As the sea is always open to those who desire to wash in it, so also the gates of repentance are always open (DeutR 2.12; PRK 24.2).55 God showed this by accepting the repentance of Ahab, the Ninevites and even Manasseh. The angels objected to God receiving Manasseh’s repentance, but God made an opening in the Throne of Glory so that Manasseh’s prayer might reach Him, so that the door might be open for all who repent (PRK 24.11).56 When asked, ‘What is the punishment for sinners?’ Wisdom answered, ‘Evil pursues sinners’ (Prov. 13.21), Prophecy answered, ‘The person who sins will die’ (Ezek. 18.4), the Torah answered, ‘Let him bring 53

54

55

56

According to Tan, vayishlah, 2, the sounding of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a call to repentance in preparation for the Day of Atonement. E.g. Sifra, emor, pereq 14 (102a); Sifra, ahare mot, pereq 8 (83a); MRI, bahodesh, 7; t.Yoma 4:9; p. Yoma 8:7, 45c; LevR 20.12. Occasional views are expressed suggesting that the Day of Atonement is efficacious in certain circumstances (e.g. for minor sins) on its own, even without repentance (see Shebu 13a). See also SongR 5.2.2: ‘The Holy Blessed One said to Israel: “My sons, open for me a single opening of repentance like the point of a needle, and I will open for you openings through which wagons and coaches could enter”’ (cf. PesR 15.6). On Manasseh’s repentance, see m.San 10:2; p.San 10:2, 28b–c; San 103a; LevR 30.3; DeutR 2.20; NumR 14.1; RuthR 5.6.



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a guilt offering’ (Lev. 5.6), but God says, ‘Let him repent, and I will accept him’ (p.Mak 2:7, 31d; cf. PRK 24.7). The aggadah is extensive and dynamic in its reflection on the power of repentance to bring about atonement for sin.57 Repentance involves a humble recognition of human fault and the resolve to change, but the penitent is not left in doubt as to how God will respond. Those who repent can count on God’s aceptance. As Katz explains: In rabbinic Judaism redemption is conceived of as an ‘earned response’ – human beings merit redemption through their good deeds and through their ‘repentance’. This means that God responds to human beings after they have responded appropriately to Him … Of course God, in his graciousness, acts on behalf of humankind for the benefit of men and women, to a degree greater than required according to a strict measure because of His affection for His creatures … divine compassion gives new, transcendental, value to human deeds and human destiny.58

The logic of repentance follows the principle of measure for measure. Because the human will acting in rebellion brought disruption between God and creation, provision is made for restoration through the free exercise of the human will in repentance.59 Each person knows that God has provided him or her with the opportunity to return to God and be forgiven. This provides a sense of self-determination in the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement.60

Temple Substitutes The Rabbis developed their theology of sin and atonement after the destruction of the temple. As we have seen, repentance was the principal means for receiving 57

58 59

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It is a commonplace in rabbinic literature that repentance must be genuine and accompanied by right deeds; e.g. ‘If someone says, “I will sin and then repent; I will sin and then repent,” that person will not be given the opportunity to do repentance’ (m.Yoma 8.9; cf. Yoma 86b; Hag 16a). To repent but not change one’s ways is likened to one who holds a dead reptile while undergoing ritual immersion for purification. The impurity remains until the dead reptile is cast away (Taan 16a). It is generally taught that God accepts those who repent of their sins at the very end of life (t.Kid 1.16; Kid 40b; p.Peah 1.1, 16b), but it is not advisable to postpone repentance (Shab 153a). Typically, one cannot repent after death, but alternative views are sometimes expressed, e.g. ‘If someone persists in his rebellion, he is brought down to Sheol below, to Sheol and Gehenna, like a scorpion that is thrown down to the earth and into a pit; but if he repents, they fling him back out like one shoots an arrow with a bow’ (Tan, haʼazinu, 1). Katz, ‘Man, Sin, and Redemption in Rabbinic Judaism’, p. 942. Neusner (and Chilton), Classical Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, pp. 194–5. In other words, just as by the human will came the penalty of sin, so also by the human will comes atonement for sin. Solomon Schimmel, The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 236–7.

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atonement once proper animal sacrifice was no longer possible. In addition, other acts and dispositions of piety came to serve as symbolic substitutes for animal sacrifice.61 For example, offering prayers could be seen as equivalent to offering temple sacrifices (Sifre Deut 41; Ber 15a; 32b; PRK 24.19; SongR 4.4.9; p.Ber 4.4, 8d). Those who study Torah are regarded as if they had presented pure offerings (Men 110a; LevR 7.3; Tan, ahare mot, 10). Taking up the Lulav on Sukkot is reckoned as making a proper sacrificial gift (Suk 45a). A person’s table at home is like the altar in the temple (Ber 55a; Men 97a). Humility and a broken heart can stand in the place of animal sacrifice (Sot 5b; San 43b).62 One’s own fat and blood lost during a fast may be regarded as an acceptable substitute for the fat and blood of a sacrificial animal (Ber 17a; PRK 24.19). Acts such as these facilitated sacrificial piety even when literal sacrifices in the temple could not be performed. Furthermore, suffering and death were seen as agents of atonement. Personal suffering could be said to wash away sin, as exemplified in the afflictions caused by leprosy, which are said to be like an altar of atonement (Ber 5a–b). Those who suffer from excessive poverty, intestinal sickness or government persecution will not see Gehenna (Erub 41b). The blood of a bruise can atone like the blood of a burnt offering (Hul 7b). Indeed, chastisements experienced in this life atone better than sacrifices (MRI, bahodesh, 10; Sifre Deut 32). In this way of thinking, suffering becomes a symbolic substitute for harsher punishments that would otherwise follow from sin. Such a view ‘draws on the materials of life itself, its pain and end, and transforms them into components of atonement’.63 Insofar as death was considered a penalty for sin, it was concluded that a person could pay the penalty of sin by dying (Sifre Num 112). A scriptural text such as Isaiah 22.14 (‘This iniquity will not be atoned for you until you die’) was taken as evidence that a person’s death brings atonement (MRI, bahodesh, 7). Certainly the death of the righteous was thought to effect atonement, just as the red heifer atoned for sin (MK 28a; LevR 20.12; TanB, ahare mot, 10; cf. Num. 19.2-10).64 But even the death of a sinner like Achan atoned for his sin (m.San 61

62 63 64

One dimension of the ritual significance of sacrifice is that the punishment due to a guilty person can be transposed through sacrifice to the symbolic realm. With animal sacrifice, punishment is directed to a different entity that represents the subject. Yet, other symbolic transpositions are possible, such as replacing the punishment with a lesser symbolic penalty or act of piety that is exacted from the original subject; see Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 29–37. Cf. Ps. 40.6; 51.16; Hos. 6.6; 14.2. Halbertal, On Sacrifice, p. 46. See also Sifre Deut 333, where it is stated that an Israelite who is killed by one of the nations of the world receives atonement in the world to come.



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6.2; t.San 9.5). ‘In the halakhic context, death achieves atonement for sin, leading to the resurrection at the end of days.’65 Death was the penalty paid by every person in order to receive a place in the world to come.

Conclusion Rabbinic perspectives on sin do not form a totally consistent theological statement on the topic. There was no dogmatic formulation on sin that served as a benchmark for classical Rabbinic Judaism. On many aspects of the doctrine of sin different Sages held differing viewpoints. Despite all of this, the main contours of rabbinic thought can be traced: Through their God-given free will, humans sin by rebelling against God’s just rule. God provided the Torah so that Israel might choose the right path and turn away from the evil inclination. Humans are able to obey God’s commands, but they are also flawed and need divine aid, which God graciously gives to the one who will take the first step towards God. In order to help people in their failings, God has enabled them to find atonement through repentance and accompanying good deeds. People show themselves prone to sin, but not destined to sin. Humanity is capable of terrible evil, but progress is also possible if people will make right choices.

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Neusner (and Chilton), Classical Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, pp. 219–20. Neusner comments as follows on Achan: ‘Just as Achan pays the supreme penalty but secures his place in the world to come, so all Israel, with only a few exceptions, is going to stand in judgment and enter the world to come, explicitly including all manner of criminals and sinners.’

9

Irenaeus James R. Payton, Jr.

Early post-apostolic Christianity knew several gifted leaders during the second century. While on his way to martyrdom in Rome Ignatius of Antioch wrote seven letters offering keen insight into faith and seasoned pastoral advice. The unknown author of Letter to Diognetus presented a winsome rationale for Christian fidelity in an increasingly hostile environment. Justin Martyr composed cogent arguments and Theophilus of Antioch manifested rhetorical skill in defending Christian teaching. And Melito of Sardis composed profound reflections on how Christ fulfilled the intimations and expectations of the Jewish Scriptures.1 Yet in the constellation of these early Christian worthies, Irenaeus of Lyons outshone all the rest. Two works written in the 180s established his sterling reputation. On the Apostolic Preaching served as a concise precis of the Christian faith proclaimed by the apostles and handed down in the church.2 His massive magnum opus, A Refutation and Subversion of What is Falsely Called Knowledge – better known as Against Heresies – devastatingly critiqued Gnostic and other aberrant perspectives in its first two books and in the last three elaborated Christian teaching more fully and thoroughly than any 1

2

For Ignatius of Antioch, see The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations of Their Writings, 2nd edn, ed. Michael W. Holmes, trans. J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), pp. 28–101; for Letter to Diognetus, see Apostolic Fathers, pp. 534–55; for Justin Martyr, see ANF 1:163–306; for Theophilus of Antioch, see ANF 2:89–121; for Melito of Sardis, see Stuart George Hall, trans. and ed., Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments (London: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 2–61; excerpts from all these are found in James R. Payton, Jr. (ed.), A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today (Chesterton, IN: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2013), at (respectively) pp. 33–5, 55–7, 59–68, 73–5, 76–84. This work was long thought lost, until an Armenian version was found in Erevan, Armenia, in 1904. Closely studied over the last century, scholars have divided the work into 100 sections, to facilitate reference; the work has been translated into several languages. Two English versions are used in this study: St. Irenaeus of Lyons: On the Apostolic Preaching, trans. John Behr (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997) and St. Irenaeus: Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. Joseph P. Smith (New York: Newman Press, 1952). These texts will be cited by the section number and the page numbers of the translation used in the following format: AP (Behr) and AP (Smith).

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other early Christian author had managed.3 Irenaeus was the church’s first great theologian. But it is important not to load that designation with some of the freight it carries in later Christian history. He was certainly not a ‘philosophical’ theologian examining doctrine through the lens of a metaphysical perspective. Although his schooling had grounded him well in Greek intellectual culture,4 he refused to depend on it for Christian teaching, pointing out his opponents relied on it for their approaches – reserving especially harsh words for Aristotle’s influence.5 Furthermore, Irenaeus was not what would later be styled a ‘systematic’ theologian, offering sequential treatment of doctrinal loci in a linear fashion.6 He was not concerned to cover all possible points of doctrine, discern how they fit together, and set that forth as a comprehensive ‘system’ of teaching.7 Irenaeus offered ‘the first great synthesis of Christian thought’,8 to be sure, but ‘he does so according to his own rationale, rather than the ‘logical’ order of Christian theology that we might expect to see’.9 If we are going to understand Irenaeus’ presentation on any issue – including sin, the focus of this book – we must recognize and work within the way he approached and organized his teaching.10

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

The shorter title probably originated with Eusebius of Caesarea (in Ecclesiastical History 2.13,5). References to Against Heresies in this study appear as AH and the book numbers, followed by a colon, preface or chapter number, followed by a comma, and section. References to the English translation will be to James R. Payton, Jr., Irenaeus on the Christian Faith: A Condensation of “Against Heresies” (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011). For references to portions of AH elided in ICF but cited here, citation will be to the nineteenth-century English version found at ANF 1:315–567. Irenaeus was trained in Smyrna; scholarship has shown that Smyrna and Ephesus were the two chief centres of the most sophisticated intellectual culture at the time, known as the Second Sophistic. Irenaeus’ writings manifest acquaintance with the main emphases and foci of that culture, the Hellenic and Hellenistic poets and philosophers. See Irenaeus’ treatment at AH 2:14,1–5 (ANF 1:376–7), which culminates with the declaration: ‘These heretics also try to transfer to faith that hairsplitting and subtle mode of handling questions learned from Aristotle.’ See ICF, p. 46. When Pope Benedict XVI discussed Irenaeus in a series of popular reflections on the church fathers, his positive assessment was overstated when he commented that Irenaeus ‘emerges as the first great Church theologian who created systematic theology’. While is fair to note, as Benedict immediately did, that ‘[Irenaeus] himself speaks of the system of theology – that is, of the internal coherence of all faith’, the ‘system’ and ‘internal coherence’ which Irenaeus sets forth does not follow the patterns of systematic theology as that discipline has developed. See Pope Benedict XVI, The Fathers, vol. 1 (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2008), p. 28. See the distinction drawn by Denis Minns: even though ‘Irenaeus was not attempting a systematic synthesis of theology’, he still ‘deserves his reputation as the first theologian to try to pull Christian teaching together into a coherent whole’. See Minns, Irenaeus: An Introduction (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), pp. xi, 13. Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. xiv. John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 73. I am grateful to two of my students, Jonathan Van Santen and Lauralee VandenBerg-Kok, whose papers on sin in Irenaeus’ teaching enriched my understanding of the topic.

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Preserving the Apostolic Tradition Irenaeus insisted on the importance of remaining faithful to the apostolic tradition. He had been trained in his youth by Polycarp of Smyrna, who himself had been taught while still a young man by the apostle John, who was by then elderly.11 Irenaeus strenuously insisted that, as over against the numerous aberrations proclaimed by his various opponents, the genuine Christian faith was what the apostles had heard from the lips of Christ himself, proclaimed within the church and passed on to the church’s leaders, both bishops and presbyters. Those leaders had carefully handed it on to subsequent leaders, who had continued the pattern. In this way, the apostolic tradition had been faithfully passed on within the church. It is striking that, through Polycarp, Irenaeus stood at only one remove from the teaching of the apostles themselves, and that he had learned from his teacher to prize that apostolic teaching as the genuine article; he was utterly confident, and the early church with him, that he spoke truth in this regard. He even went on to claim that, no matter where one might travel in the empire or beyond it, if anyone went into a church founded by an apostle, that person would hear one and the same faith declared.12 In his writings, he sought – for the first time – to present that faith in a cohesive fashion. For Irenaeus, the Christian faith finds its foundation in the passion of Christ – not just in the sense that it is the way salvation is accomplished, but as the starting-point for reading Scripture. That is, Irenaeus took the dominical instruction given to the disciples after the resurrection (Lk. 24.44) as the divinely given key to understanding what ‘the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms’ – a common Jewish way of referring to their Scriptures – actually taught: they focused on the incarnate Son of God, who lived, died, and rose again to fulfil all that had been written. Irenaeus proclaimed that this is how the apostles had read Scripture and expounded it. This had been passed down faithfully to and by bishops and presbyters. This is fundamental to the Christian faith: it shapes the way Scripture should be read and moulds what should be understood from it. With this, Irenaeus specified the incarnate Son as the ‘hypothesis’ for all of Scripture, using a term from Hellenistic literary theory. The term referred 11

12

See Irenaeus’ comments at AH 3:3,4 (ICF, pp. 58–9); a fuller description appears in his ‘Letter to Florinus’, preserved by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 5.20. Irenaeus made these points repeatedly: he offered an extended argument to this effect at AH 3.3,1–4 (ICF pp. 57–9), with briefer treatments at AH 1.10,3; 3.12,7; 3.24,1; 4.35,4; 5.20,1 (respectively, at ICF pp. 33–4, 68, 83, 142, 171–2).

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to the plot or outline of a drama or epic, which underlay all the facets of that drama or epic and gave meaning to the entire story.13 According to Irenaeus, his opponents’ ‘hypothesis’ came from their own notions, which they attempted to foist upon Scripture.14 The only way to read Scripture rightly, according to Irenaeus, was to start with the passion of Christ.15 This Christocentric approach to Scripture, handed down from the apostles, was found in the ‘rule of faith’ shared within the church. Earlier church leaders had alluded to the apostolic deposit which had been transmitted to and within the church,16 but Irenaeus was the first to write it down.17 He did that at two places in Against Heresies and also in On the Apostolic Preaching, where he presented the rule in more depth.18 The three versions Irenaeus offered of the rule of faith indicated that this rule was not a matter of precise wording, but of a common approach to Scripture. That rule referred to God as Creator, focused on the incarnate Son and what he accomplished, and pointed to the Spirit of God – obviously reflecting the practice of baptism into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This rule subsequently became the basis in Western Christianity for what is known as the Apostles’ Creed, which was first encountered in its approximate wording in the third century in Rome. But as Irenaeus knew and used the rule, it was not a creed: it was a sure guide for right teaching because it secured the only right interpretation of Scripture.19 The rule of faith pointed to and focused on the ‘hypothesis’ of Scripture. According to Irenaeus, this all led to an understanding of God’s work, as revealed in Scripture, which began with Christ and saw everything in terms of him. As will be seen below, this has significant implications for understanding the creation of humankind, but at this point it is necessary to recognize that 13 14 15

16

17

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Behr, Irenaeus, pp. 105–6. AH 1:9,3–4 (ANF 1.329–30). As Steenberg urges, ‘it is not what one reads in Scripture, but how one reads it, that forms the basis of Irenaeus’ methodology. He continues: ‘What the early text might mean “on its own”, apart from the testimony of the life of Christ, interests Irenaeus little.’ See Matthew C. Steenberg, Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 23–4. Significantly, Irenaeus’ teacher had done so. See Polycarp, Phil. 7.2 (Apostolic Fathers, p. 215). It is also intriguing to compare the close similarity between Irenaeus’ rendition of the rule of faith and the rendition found in Ignatius, Trall. 9 (Apostolic Fathers, p. 165). In the next generation, Tertullian offered another written account of the rule of faith in Prescription Against Heretics, ch. 9. AH 1.10,1; 3.4,2 (ICF, pp. 32, 60); AP 6 (Behr, pp. 43–4; Smith, p. 51). See Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 76–7: ‘The apostolic witness – what the apostles preached based on how Christ taught them to understand the Scriptures – is what produces the rule, or canon, of faith … More than an interpretive key, it functions as a hermeneutical key because it first of all summarizes the entire underlying sense and coherence principle, or hypothesis, of Scripture.’

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Irenaeus interpreted the work of Christ as a ‘recapitulation’ of all that God had done in history prior to the actual incarnation itself. This term came from the rhetorical tradition in Hellenistic intellectual culture. The verb ‘to recapitulate’ referred to a way of summarizing what had previously been presented by touching again on the main points of an argument or story.20 For Irenaeus, God had acted in various ways in human history, but there was a single underlying divine ‘economy’ – a term which referred to the divine oversight and direction of history to his purposes. Building on the Adam/ Christ parallel found in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, Irenaeus expounded the work of the incarnate Son as a reenacting correction or fulfilment of what Adam had been and done in the first steps in the journey of that economy. In Christ, one finds that recapitulation, and in that recapitulation, one finds God’s intention with and for humanity. In Christ one finds not only the end, but also the beginning. The perspectives above, fundamental for Irenaeus’ thought, shaped the way he dealt with the creation of humanity. He did not commence as we might expect, with Genesis 1 and 2; rather, he began with Christ. For Irenaeus, ‘in the divine scheme of things, Christ comes first, then Adam’.21 How this worked out needs elaboration.

Irenaeus on Christ and Human Beings In early patristics for which Irenaeus is the chief spokesman, the one whom the church preached was Jesus Christ, encountered in his wholeness as a person who, in that encounter, came to be recognized as the eternal Word of God. Jesus Christ was not first confessed as Son of God who (in history) became incarnate: following the pattern seen with Thomas (Jn 20.25-28), the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ was confessed to be both Lord and God. ‘The starting point is not a dogmatic confession of the Son followed by a description of his human becoming, but the human Christ, who from and in his humanity is identified with the eternal Son of the Father. One does not begin with the eternal Word, later to take flesh. One begins with the flesh and bones of Jesus of Galilee, and sees in him the eternity of the divine Son.’22 The one whom the apostle John wrote of as ‘the Word’ who was ‘in the beginning with God and was God’ (Jn 20 21 22

Minns, Irenaeus, p. 108. Bouteneff, Beginnings, p. 82. Steenberg, Of God and Man, p. 3.

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1.1), through whom all things were made, receiving life from him in whom there is life (Jn 1.2-4), was that ‘Word [who] became flesh’ (Jn 1.14) – whom the apostle first encountered as the person Jesus Christ, who ‘lived among us’ (Jn 1.14). Irenaeus’ starting point was not a ‘confession that there is a divine, eternal Word who at a moment in history becomes incarnate as Jesus Christ … To abstract the Son, or the divinity of the Son, from the person of Jesus Christ – as, for example, the eternal reality or person that “became” Jesus Christ – is to disfigure the language of Christianity’s earliest testimony.’23 In Irenaeus’ presentation of the Christian faith, everything started with the passion of Christ, including his perspective on humanity’s creation. It is not, of course, that Irenaeus could not read what the apostle John wrote, ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’ (Jn 1.14), and see that it referred to the pre-existing Logos. But Irenaeus’ embrace of the apostolic tradition of interpreting Scripture from the crucified and resurrected Christ served as a default position for him: to read about that Logos was to turn to the incarnate Word – not simply as a later stage in the economy of redemption, but as the one in whom that economy is assured from eternity. Two passages in Irenaeus will help clarify this. In referring to John 1.14, Irenaeus urged against his opponents that ‘John, proclaiming one God, the Almighty, and one Jesus Christ, the only-begotten, by whom all things were made, declares that this was the Son of God, the onlybegotten [1.18], the maker of all things [1.3], the true light who enlightens every person [1.4], the creator of the world [1.0], the one who came to his own [1.11], the one who became flesh and dwelled among us [1.14]’.24 To be sure, several of Irenaeus’ opponents rejected the notion that a genuine deity could take matter unto itself and ‘become flesh’. But Irenaeus’ adamant assertion that the Logos spoken of by the apostle could only be recognized and known as Jesus Christ was more than just a tactical rhetorical argument to undermine those opponents’ views: it encapsulated Irenaeus’ understanding of how to interpret the apostle’s words faithfully. In another intriguing passage, Irenaeus expounded the genealogy of Christ offered in Luke 3.23-38 in a way that showed the same ‘default perspective’ in his thought. Irenaeus pointed out that this genealogy moved backwards through history, ‘connecting the end [Jesus Christ] with the beginning [Adam]’ and, in 23 24

Ibid., pp. 3–4. AH 1:9,2 (ICF p. 30, emphasis added). Also see Irenaeus’ subsequent comment: ‘he [the apostle John] spoke about our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he confesses to be the Word of God’ (AH 1.9,2 [ICF, p. 31]).

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Adam, including the whole of humanity descended from him. But Irenaeus then urged that the apostle Paul called Adam ‘a type of the one to come’ (Rom. 5.14) because ‘the Word, the Fashioner of all things, prefigured in him [Adam] the future economy relating to the Son of God on behalf of the human race’. As a type, the first man was created to conform and point to the Saviour of humankind: ‘since the Saviour pre-exists, it was necessary that the one to be saved should also exist, so that the Saviour should not be without purpose.’25 In Irenaeus’ perspective, humanity is created because the Word is the Saviour, the Christ of the passion: ‘In Adam, the Word sketched out in advance what would be revealed and established in the Son of God, Christ himself. The description of Adam as a “type” implies the prior existence of the one of whom he is a type.’26 One scholar has expressed this with the bold affirmation, ‘Adam exists because of Christ’s saving passion’.27 This approach mulded Irenaeus’ understanding of human beings created ‘in the image of God’. Irenaeus knew well that God is bodiless, but that did not mean for Irenaeus that the ‘image of God’ must therefore be immaterial (as soul or spirit). After affirming the power of God manifest in creation, Irenaeus described the tender care God showed in making humankind: ‘But man He fashioned with His own hands, taking of the purest and finest of earth, in measured wise mingling with the earth His own power; for He gave his frame the outline of His own form … for it was as an image of God that man was fashioned and set on earth.’28 Even more specifically, Irenaeus declared: ‘God is glorified in his handiwork; he fits it so that it conforms to and is modeled after his own Son.’29 For Irenaeus, ‘image’ and ‘form’ presupposed matter. So, ‘he is emphatic that the image of God in man is described quite concretely in the flesh … As God himself is immaterial, and therefore formless, the archetype of the image of God in man must be the incarnate Son of God.’30 In Irenaeus’ restatement of what God had declared in the early chapters of Genesis, he urged: ‘[God] made man in the image of God, and the image of God is the Son, according to whose image man was made; and for this reason, He appeared in the last times, to render the image like Himself.’31 With Irenaeus, the ‘image of God’ in which humanity was created referred not to some general 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

AH 3.22,3, as translated by Behr in Irenaeus, pp. 145–6. Behr, Irenaeus, p. 146. Bouteneff, Beginnings, p. 82. AP 11 (Smith, p. 54, emphasis added). AH 5.6,1 (ICF p. 159, emphasis added). John Behr, Anthropology and Asceticism in Irenaeus and Clement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 89. AP 22 (Behr, pp. 53–4)

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characteristics in which humankind somehow reflected God. Rather, that image is specific: it refers to the incarnate Son, who is the ultimate image of God,32 who by his passion will bring us to be like him: in the celebrated declaration of Irenaeus, ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ … through his transcendent love became what we are, that he might make us to be what he is’.33 With Irenaeus, ‘the crucified and risen Lord comes first, and Adam is made with reference to him. The nature of the recapitulation, which puts Christ at the center of the human trajectory from creation to salvation, is therefore such that Irenaeus can speak of Adam as being made in the image of the incarnate Christ.’34 As Irenaeus himself expressed it: ‘In times long past, it was said that humanity was created after the image of God. That could not be seen, though, for the Word after whose image humanity had been created remained invisible … However, when the Word of God became flesh, he … showed forth the image truly, since he himself became what was his image, and he re-established the image after a sure manner.’35 Having affirmed that humankind was created bodily, in the image of God, Irenaeus also dealt with the ‘likeness’ to God mentioned in Genesis 1.26. In expanding on this, Irenaeus declared, ‘according to the formation, man was like God. Accordingly, he was free and master of himself ’ – so that, as Irenaeus went on to urge, humanity should tend and rule the rest of creation.36 This ‘likeness’ had reference to the immaterial component of the human being, specifically the ability to choose or decide – the will. Irenaeus argued that human self-determination was important to God, who wanted his image-bearers not to respond in some sort of automatic or preset pattern imposed by their natures, but with the free choice to turn to him and walk in his ways.37 Irenaeus presented this as ‘the ancient law of liberty: God made human beings free from the beginning, possessing their own power, even as they do their own souls, to obey the commands of God voluntarily, and not by divine compulsion. For there is no coercion with God.’38 With this will, human beings were to choose to be faithful

Steenberg, Of God and Man, p. 37. AH 5, preface (ICF, p. 156). 34 Bouteneff, Beginnings, p. 82. 35 AH 5.16,2 (ICF, pp. 168–9). 36 AP 11 (Behr, p. 47). 37 See Minns’ observation: ‘As [Irenaeus] sees it, the only possibilities are a world in which human beings are free to choose between good and evil … or a world in which human beings have no power of choice between good and evil but are determined by a natural necessity to do good’ (Irenaeus, p. 90). 38 AH 4.37,1 (ICF, p. 145). After reviewing several scriptural passages in which God calls humans to respond to him, Irenaeus urges: ‘“All such passages indicate the independence of human will, as well as the counsel which God conveys to them … without, however, in any way coercing us”’ (AH 4.37,3 [ICF, pp. 146–7]). 32

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to their Creator. So, with Irenaeus, ‘likeness to God’ had not only a given-ness to it: it also was a goal for these image-bearers to pursue. If and as they continued to walk in God’s ways, they would become ever more like him, manifesting as mere creatures what he was as Creator. As Irenaeus described it: ‘This was the goal of the human race, inheriting God.’39 In this freedom of initiative, Adam and Eve were ‘like God’. This likeness would be tested, with dire consequences. But before turning to consider that, it is important to recognize how humanity was not, according to Irenaeus, ‘like God’ – in two regards. First, while God had brought humankind into existence, the human beings constituted by creation were not subsumed into a large ‘chain of being’ that also somehow included God. Irenaeus’ Gnostic adversaries posited an awkward chain of being that stretched from a purely immaterial Ultimate at one end, through a variety of less pure emanations, eventually reaching down to include the creation brought into physical existence by a dimwit Demiurge. Irenaeus resolutely rejected any such perspective: for him, the Creator and the creation he brought into existence do not ‘share being’.40 In this regard, Irenaeus posited an enormous gap between the Creator and the creation: God alone is; all creatures are in a state of becoming.41 Adam and Eve were to rule over and work with the rest of creation to enable it to become all God intended for it, with the rich potential he had invested in it. Similarly, Adam and Eve themselves were to become what they were intended to be: they were ‘in God’s image’, but ‘after his likeness’ (Gen. 1.26): they were to cultivate the seminal likeness to God they had in their free choice, by choosing faithfully to commune with God and walk in his ways and, thus, become increasingly ‘like God’.42 Indeed, ‘The notion that Adam was not created perfect, but rather created in the image of God and intended to come to be in the likeness of God at the end of a process of development, is Irenaeus’ most characteristic understanding of Genesis 1.26, and the one that most coheres with the rest of his theological scheme’.43 This points to a second way in which created humankind was not ‘like God’. If God alone is, then only God has life. A characteristic emphasis of Irenaeus is that God created ex nihilo – not utilizing the eternally existent matter posited by 39 40

41 42

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AH 4.22,1 (ICF, p. 121). ‘For Irenaeus, there is absolutely no continuity of being between God and creation.’ See Minns, Irenaeus, p. 42. Ibid., p. 83. As Bouteneff points out, the distinction between ‘image of God’ as gift and ‘likeness to God’ as goal would become common (although not universal) in later patristic teaching. See Bouteneff, Beginnings, p. 80. Minns, Irenaeus, p. 75.

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Aristotle. Instead, God brought all of creation from non-existence into existence. The creatures thus brought into existence did not have life in themselves, but only as a gift from the Creator. So, the fact of their creation did not mean they would live forever: rather, from Irenaeus’ perspective, except for divine intervention, they would collapse back into non-existence from which they had been called.44 For Irenaeus, this included humankind. When God breathed the ‘breath of life’ into the one he had made from ‘the dust of the ground’ and the one created thus ‘became a living being’ (Gen. 27), the life thus granted was not eternal or everlasting: such life belongs only to God. Animated by the gift of life, humanity existed as the culmination of creation, especially blessed by God to bear his image and called to become like him. Created for life, they did not need to die; rather, their life would be enhanced if and as they became increasingly like God.45 But, even so, they were only creatures, and according to Irenaeus, created humanity – even before the fall into sin – was mortal.46 If humankind continued to live faithfully with God and walk in his ways – if they became, in their fidelity and under his blessing, more and more ‘like God’ – then God would bless them with a likeness that would include sharing in his everlasting life. But that is not what happened.

Irenaeus on Fallen Humanity According to Irenaeus, Adam and Eve were created as mere children who needed to grow into full maturity. Their youthful innocence kept them from lust but also exposed them to deception.47 They knew communion with God in the garden and received his commandment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – which was intended to remind these young image-bearers that they had a Lord whom they served.48 To understand what transpired in the garden, Irenaeus turned to the passage, ‘God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his 44

45

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47 48

See Irenaeus: ‘The things he made received their beginnings; whatever has a beginning, though, is also liable to dissolution, so it always needs the care of him who made all things.’ See AH 3.8,3 (ICF, p. 63). Again, Irenaeus: ‘And He laid down for him certain conditions: so that, if he kept the command of God, then he would always remain as he was, that is, immortal; but if he did not, he would become mortal, melting into earth, whence his frame had been taken.’ See AP 15 (Smith, p. 56). See Behr, Irenaeus, p. 172: ‘[It is not] simply that human beings became mortal; for they were always mortal, that is, capable of death.’ AP 12, 14 (Behr, pp. 27, 28; Smith, pp. 55, 56). AP 15 (Behr, p. 49; Smith, pp. 56–7).

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own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world’ (Wis. Sol 2.23-24). Irenaeus urged that sin intruded into the creation when an exalted angel, ‘becoming jealous of the man and looking on him with envy because of God’s many favours which He had bestowed on the man, both ruined himself and made the man a sinner, persuading him to disobey God’s command’. This fallen angel had thus ‘become by falsehood the head and fount of sin’.49 Irenaeus declared that the angel ‘offended God’ and ‘apostatized from God’, with the result that ‘he was called Satan in the Hebrew tongue, which is, Apostate – the same one is also called the Devil’.50 Irenaeus portrays this temptation and sin poignantly: ‘The serpent beguiled Eve, by promising her what he did not have himself ’, and Adam was similarly ‘beguiled … through the false promise of immortality’, with the serpent ‘promising that they should be “like God” (Gen. 3.5) – something out of their reach’.51 In performing this act, Satan rebelled against his Creator and tried to enlist humankind in his ranks, against God: ‘This was the apostate angel: the enemy, envious of God’s workmanship [Wis Sol 2.24], sought to make humanity God’s enemy’, with the result that ‘humankind … – no doubt carelessly, but still wickedly – disobeyed him [God]’.52 How could it happen that Adam and Eve transgressed the one prohibition God had given them? In part, Irenaeus’ answer was their inexperience. They had never encountered falsehood or deception, and in their innocence were beguiled and succumbed to the temptation. But it also was also their youth: ‘The sin of Adam and Eve was a sin of disobedience, and precisely the sort of disobedience one might expect of children or adolescents. Told that something of inestimable value (likeness to God) was to be bestowed upon them when they were ready to receive it, they refused to wait. They wanted everything, and they wanted it at once.’53 According to Irenaeus, God did not intend to withhold the knowledge of good and evil from his human creation, because such knowledge was necessary for their growth into full maturity. The problem is that Adam and Eve precipitously partook of that fruit before they had matured enough to be granted it.54 They were to abide by God’s directives and await his timing. ‘Irenaeus characterizes this readiness to accept the designs of God for man as faith and subjection’, John Behr says, ‘a trusting obedience, and specifies that 49

50 51 52 53 54

AP 16 (Smith, p. 57). Irenaeus returns to this assessment of the tempter, describing him as ‘the author of transgression’. See AH 3.20,1 (ICF, p. 76). AP 16 (Behr, p. 49). Citations taken, respectively, from AH 4, preface, 4; 3:23,5; and 3:23,1 (ICF, pp. 85, 82, 81). AH 4.40,3 (ICF, p. 152). Minns, Irenaeus, p. 76. See Irenaeus’ discussion in AH 4.38,1 (ICF, pp. 148–9).

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it is this which man can and must offer.’55 Or, as Irenaeus puts it: ‘It is good to obey God, to believe in him, and to keep his commandment: indeed, this is the life of humanity, just as not to obey God is evil – it is death.’56 Adam and Eve would learn this truth by brutal experience and bitter taste, as they came to the knowledge of good and evil. For Irenaeus, none of this came as a surprise to God. The Creator who brought humankind into existence had made sure they were created in the image of the crucified and resurrected Son of God, the Saviour. There is only one divine economy, embracing creation and salvation in a seamless unity.57 Irenaeus explains: ‘According to his great kindness he graciously conferred good on us and made human beings like himself, in their own power. At the same time by his prescience he knew the weakness of human beings and the consequences which would flow from it. But by love and power he would overcome the limitations of created nature.’58 He would achieve this through the recapitulation accomplished by that incarnate Son, who would conquer sin, death and the devil. As Irenaeus expounded the results of humanity’s first sin, he wrote about the divine curse which fell on the serpent, on Satan, and on the ground – but not on humanity: ‘After Adam transgressed, as Scripture relates, God pronounced no curse upon Adam, but upon the ground, which he was to work … The curse in all its fullness fell upon the serpent, which had beguiled them.’ To be sure, our first parents were punished, with Adam’s arduous tilling of the earth and Eve enduring laborious childbirth and the challenges of serving her husband; the human family would encounter the curse on the ground as it made life difficult for them.59 But Irenaeus emphasizes that the God against whom they had rebelled ‘took compassion on humankind … God turned the enmity by which the apostate angel tried to make humanity God’s enemy against its author: instead of being angry with humankind, God turned his anger in another direction, settling it instead on the serpent.’ Irenaeus went on immediately to cite God’s promise to put enmity between the offsprings of the serpent and of the woman, noting that ‘the Lord fulfilled this in himself ’.60 Death came to humanity as a result of its sin, as God had warned (Gen. 2.17). For Irenaeus, that death was not a curse but the consequence of sin. For Irenaeus, 55 56 57

58 59 60

Behr, Anthropology, p. 117. AH 4.39,1 (ICF, p. 150). Behr, Irenaeus, p. 147. He continues with a striking formulation of this insight: ‘We are … far removed from any attempt to think of creation and salvation as being respectively, in rather crude terms, “Plan A”, followed by the “Fall”, which is then rectified by “Plan B”.’ AH 4.38,4 (ICF, p. 150). AH 3.23,3 (ICF, pp. 81–2, emphasis added). AH 4.40,3 (ICF, p. 152).

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‘communion with God is life’.61 When Adam and Eve sinned, they turned from life, so death was the sure result: ‘Disobedience to God entails death. So, at that very moment they became forfeit to death and were handed over to it.’62 They did not lose ‘everlasting life’, for they never had it: such life belonged to God alone. ‘They were always mortal, capable of death … What happened to the human race in Adam is, specifically, that it became subject to mortality, caught in sin and death, unable to escape from the strong man who had beguiled them under “the pretext of immortality”.’63 But even in this, God showed compassion toward his human creatures. In expelling Adam and Eve from the garden and prohibiting access to the tree of life (Gen. 3.22-24), he showed them mercy: ‘God pitied them. He did not want them to continue to live forever as sinners … So, God set a bound to sin by interposing death, thus causing sin to cease.’64 Irenaeus viewed our first parents’ sin as a catastrophe for themselves and disastrous for their descendants. When sin entered the world, it took root in the creation and bore bitter fruit in all humankind, which has found itself thus ‘caught in sin and death’, as descendants of our first parents. As he puts it: ‘because all are implicated in the first-formation of Adam, we were bound to death through the disobedience.’65 In reflecting how this worked out in human history, Irenaeus observes that ‘wickedness spreading out for a long time, seized the entire race of men’.66 And reflecting on the apostle Paul’s declaration, ‘by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners’ (Rom. 5.19), Irenaeus urges, ‘humanity had been drawn by sin into bondage and was held by death’.67 But while Irenaeus recognizes that all humanity was profoundly affected by Adam’s sin, he neither asserts nor implies that Adam’s descendants inherited the guilt of his sin.68 Peter Bouteneff explains: ‘Adam’s transgression, though not an infection transmitted to subsequent generations, does lead to death.’69 Surrounded by the death which became the universal inheritance of Adam’s progeny, human beings continue to use their liberty of choice – an element in which, ironically, they are ‘like God’, according to Irenaeus – to choose their 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

69

AH 5.27,2 (ICF, p. 183). AH 5.23,1 (ICF, p. 177). Behr, Irenaeus, p. 172. See his earlier comment: ‘the apostasy rendered the creature who had been created for immortality mortal’ (p. 58). AH 3.23,6 (ICF, p. 83). AP 31 (Behr, p. 60). AP 18 (Behr, p. 50). AH 3.18,7 (ICF, p. 74). See Steenberg, Of God and Man, p. 46: ‘Irenaeus does not believe the guilt of Adam’s transgression was imputed to his descendants, but he does believe that Adam’s act as transgressor was of impact on future generations.’ Bouteneff, Beginnings, p. 84.

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own way: ‘Sin, from the human point of view, consists of disobedience to the divine plan, in the desire to take one’s development into one’s own hands.’70 In so doing, humanity reflects its first parentage. There is neither need nor room for a conception of inherited or transmitted guilt, for we all do quite well on our own.71

Conclusion: Towards Repristination Irenaeus asserts that human beings have power over themselves, to turn to or away from God.72 Even so, they neither believe in God nor submit to him, since they are in bondage to Satan and to death.73 Indeed, they are debtors. In commenting on the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Forgive us our debts’ (Mt. 6.12), Irenaeus averred that we are debtors to God for transgressing his commandments.74 He did not, however, move in a direction sometimes taken in later theology, to assert that the Saviour’s suffering paid a legal debt to God. Instead, he made more of our being debtors to death, noting that the Saviour – upon whom death had no claim – took that death on himself and destroyed it by his passion.75 With all this, Irenaeus maintained, God respects the freedom with which he created humankind. He made humanity in the image of God, formed according to the crucified and resurrected Son of God. His economy assures that his image-bearers will become like him, through the accomplishment of that incarnate Son. But while God has called humanity away from sin and unto himself, many do not come to him. For that they face his judgement,76 but Irenaeus repeatedly urged that this judgement, which was explicitly affirmed in the rule of faith, is according to what people have chosen for themselves.77 While it is not possible to do justice, in the brief space remaining in this chapter, to Irenaeus’ rich presentation of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ which completes God’s economy, it would be remiss not to acknowledge some highlights of that presentation. The Son of God became incarnate through 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77

Minns, Irenaeus, p. 77. Later in the patristic era, Augustine – in the search for antecedents for his distinctive views on ‘original sin’ – invoked Irenaeus, but the Bishop of Hippo certainly misread Irenaeus in this regard. AH 4.39,3; 4.37,2; 4.37,4 (ICF, pp. 151, 146, 147). AH 4.28,3; 5.21,3; 3.18,7 (ICF, pp. 128–9, 174–5, 74). AH 5.17,1; 5.17,3 (ICF, pp. 169, 170). AH 3.19,1; 5.23,2 (ICF, pp. 74, 177); AP 37 (Behr, p. 64). AP 85 (Behr, p. 92); AH 3.4,2; 4.41,2 (ICF, pp. 60, 153). See AH 1:10,1 (ICF, p. 32); AH 4.6,5; 4.6,7 (ICF, pp. 91–2); 5.27,2; 5.28,1 (ICF, pp. 183–4).

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a virgin, as Adam was formed out of virgin (untilled) earth; Jesus Christ confronted and overcame Satan in a temptation about food, displacing Adam’s failure; the disobedience which took place through a tree was overcome by obedience on a tree.78 Irenaeus’ works offered many more such striking proclamations of the repristination in which God reclaimed his handiwork for himself. We can do no better than to close this brief summation in Irenaeus’ own words: ‘By his passion our Lord also destroyed death, dispersed error, put an end to corruption, and destroyed ignorance, while he manifested life, revealed truth, and granted the gift of incorruption’; and ‘When he became incarnate and was made human, he began anew the long line of human beings and, to state it briefly, furnished us with salvation. Consequently, what we had lost in Adam – namely, the image and likeness of God – we recovered in Christ Jesus.’79

78 79

AP 32 (Behr, p. 61); AH 5.21,2 (ICF, pp. 173–4); AP 33 (Behr, p. 62); AH 5.17,3 (ICF, p. 170). AH 2.20,3 (ICF, p. 47); AH 3.18,1 (ICF, p. 72).

10

Athanasius Donald Fairbairn

Of the three early Christian theologians to whom this volume dedicates a chapter, Athanasius is the one least associated in people’s minds with the doctrine of sin. In the case of Irenaeus of Lyons, the greatest Christian thinker of the second century, one of the most famous elements of his thought is his depiction of humanity’s initial created state as one of imperfection, a depiction that significantly colours his view of the fall and sin.1 With regard to Augustine of Hippo, surely among his most well-known emphases is his understanding of original sin and of grace, an understanding articulated during the struggle with Pelagius from the years 412–18.2 In contrast to both Irenaeus and Augustine, Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) is known largely for his thought on the full deity of God the Son and his equality with the Father. Indeed, Athanasius’ lifelong struggle against those fourth-century thinkers who diminished the Son with respect to the Father is one of the best-known stories in the history of theology. It may be surprising, then, that a chapter in a volume on the doctrine of sin is devoted to Athanasius. If one moves past this surprise, however, one can recognize that Athanasius’ understanding of sin significantly shapes his better-known thought on the status of the Son with respect to the Father.3 Like the apostle John before him,4 Athanasius sees sin most fundamentally as unbelief and writes at great length about sin as idolatry – the act of choosing and worshipping the wrong gods 1 2 3

4

See Against Heresies 4.37-39, as discussed in Chapter 9 of this volume. See Chapters 11 and 20 of this volume. For excellent discussions of Athanasius’ overall theology, see Alvyn Petterson, Athanasius (Ridgefield, CT: Morehouse Publishing, 1995); Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004); Thomas G. Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction, Great Theologians Series (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007); Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius, Foundations of Exegesis and Christian Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011). See Chapter 6 of this volume.

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rather than believing in and worshipping the true God and his Son Jesus Christ. Furthermore, Athanasius’ discussions of sin explicitly tie together the great movements of Christian redemptive history: creation, fall and redemption. One can argue that the specific way in which he ties these together constitutes his major contribution to the Christian doctrine of sin (although not, of course, his major contribution to Christian doctrine as a whole) and justifies his inclusion in this volume. Accordingly, in this chapter I would like to focus on Athanasius’ view of sin as unbelief/idolatry and on his understanding of the relation between creation, fall and redemption. Because these ideas constitute the background to his discussions of the Son (and the Holy Spirit) in relation to the Father, they surface most clearly in his earlier writings that predate the most intense decades of the Arian controversy.5 These earlier writings are two treatises, Against the Pagans and On the Incarnation of the Word,6 and the festal letters from 329 until 337.7 I will discuss Athanasius’ thought on sin in these writings under three main heads: the relation between creation and fall, the nature of sin, and the relation between sin and redemption (or better, between sin and the Redeemer).

5

6

7

Arius was condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325 for claiming that the Son was inferior to the Father and a created being. Following his condemnation there was relatively little overt controversy until after the death of the Emperor Constantine in 337. But from the late 330s until Athanasius’ death in 373, the controversy was quite intense, and Athanasius’ writings from that time period are rather narrowly focused on the issues of the controversy. These two works (Contra gentes and De incarnatione Verbi in Latin) were written as companion works that formed a unified whole, and they do not mention Arius or the Arian controversy directly. Because of that fact, they are dated either to the years before the Arian controversy broke in 318 or 319, or at least to the years before the controversy intensified around 340. The consensus date is about 335 or 336. The critical Greek text with English translation may be found in (inter alia) Robert W. Thomson (ed.), Athanasius: Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Throughout this chapter, citations will be listed as ‘Thomson’. For discussions of the date of the two treatises, see Thomson, p. xxii; Weinandy, p. 10, n. 2. It was customary that, each year, the Bishop of Alexandria would write a letter indicating when the Lenten fast would begin and end, and when Easter would be celebrated. These festal letters (in Latin, Epistulae paschales) provided the occasion for the bishop to expound on various aspects of Christian life and doctrine. Athanasius first mentions the ‘Ariomaniacs’ in his festal letter for 338, thus indicating that the controversy is increasing in intensity by that time. After that year, the festal letters deal mainly with the issues of the controversy, except for the most famous one of all (for the year 367), in which Athanasius lists the books of the Bible. Prior to the year 338, Athanasius’ festal letters deal more with issues of sin and morality, and thus the earlier letters provide important resources for the subject of this chapter. The festal letters have been poorly preserved. There are Greek fragments of some of the letters preserved by the sixth-century Egyptian travel writer Cosmas Indicopleustes, and other festal letters have turned up in a cache of Syriac manuscripts discovered in Egypt in 1842. The letters quoted in this chapter are among the ones found in Syriac manuscripts, and the translations are taken from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 4.

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The Relation between Creation and Fall Athanasius’ understanding of sin begins with his treatment of humanity as created, and his teaching may be understood in opposition to three views common in his time. In contrast to a dualistic or gnostic view, he regards evil as having begun at a certain point in time, rather than being eternal or intrinsic to reality. In contrast to much of Greek philosophical thought, he regards humanity (including the human soul) as being naturally mortal, not naturally immortal. And in partial contrast to Irenaeus, he regards humanity’s natural mortality as something that was overcome through God’s gift at creation, not as something that needed to be overcome through the human task of aspiring to immortality. Let us look carefully at these ideas. Near the beginning of Against the Pagans, Athanasius claims: ‘Evil has not existed from the beginning, nor even now is it found among the saints nor does it exist at all with them. But it was men who later began to conceive of it and imagine it in their own likeness.’8 In this passage, the ‘saints’ are not believers but elect angels, as becomes clear later in the chapter, when Athanasius states that Adam ‘lived with the saints in the contemplation of intelligible reality’.9 Since there were no other human beings at this point in creation history, the word ‘saints’ must refer to angels, the only other created beings present at the time. Notice that among the angels, even now there is no evil, and there was a time when that was the case among human beings as well. Human beings later conceived of evil. Here Athanasius joins most of the Christian tradition in insisting that God created a wholly good world and that evil was a later phenomenon rather than something inherent in creation. A bit later in the same work, Athanasius elaborates: ‘So some Greeks, straying from the path and unaware of Christ, declared that evil existed as a self-subsistent entity [en hypostasei] and by itself. But they were wrong in these two respects.’10 In contrast, he claims, ‘we must present clearly the truth of the church’s teaching, that evil neither came from God nor was in God, nor did it exist in the beginning, nor has it any independent reality’.11 These passages show that for Athanasius, sin is not something on the order of a virus that has lain latent in God and can infect humanity from the outside. It has no independent, self-subsistent existence because it involves a change to the way God originally made the world rather 8 9 10 11

Against the Pagans 2 (Thomson, pp. 4–5). Against the Pagans 2 (Thomson, pp. 6–7). Against the Pagans 6 (Thomson, pp. 14–15). Against the Pagans 7 (Thomson, pp. 18–19).

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than simply the realization of something inherent in that world, in humanity, or even in God himself. The fact that evil is not intrinsic to the human condition, however, does not mean that human beings are or ever were naturally immortal, as most of Greek philosophy held the human soul to be. On the other hand, the fact that human beings were not naturally immortal does not imply that humanity started out mortal and had to achieve immortality. Rather, God by grace gave humanity immortality at creation, but this gift was given in such a way that it could be lost.12 These important distinctions become clear through an extended discussion of the human created condition near the beginning of On the Incarnation of the Word. Athanasius writes: Seeing that by the definition of its own existence it [humanity] would be unable to persist for ever, he [God] gave it an added grace, not simply creating men like all irrational animals on the earth, but making them in his own image and giving them also a share in the power of his own Word, so that having as it were shadows of the Word and being made rational, they might be able to remain [diamenein] in felicity and live the true life in paradise, which is really that of the saints. Furthermore, knowing that men’s faculty of free will could turn either way, he first secured the grace they had been given by imposing a law and a set place. For he brought them into his paradise and gave them a law, so that if they kept [phulaxaien] the grace and remained [menoien] good they would enjoy the life of paradise, without sorrow, pain, or care, in addition to their having the promise of immortality in heaven.13

This important passage is easy to misunderstand, because we often think that if something does not naturally belong to us, then we have to achieve it. But in Athanasius’ mind, although we were not naturally immortal (no one but God is), we did possess immortality at creation, because God gave us this immortality by grace. The initial human task, then, was not to achieve immortality, but to remain in the immortality given by God’s grace, through the keeping of the commandment. Notice in particular the two uses of the word ‘remain’ (actually two different Greek words – menein and diamenein – based on the same root). Shortly after this, Athanasius explains further: For if, having such a nature as has not always existed, they were summoned into existence by the advent and mercy of the Word, it followed that because men 12

13

For direct treatments of this aspect of Athanasius’ thought, see Petterson, Athanasius, pp. 83–7; Weinandy, Athanasius, pp. 15–16. For a discussion of these ideas in connection with modern nature–grace debates, see Leithart, Athanasius, pp. 109–15. On the Incarnation of the Word 3 (Thomson, pp. 140–1).

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were deprived of the understanding of God and had turned to things which do not exist … then they were also deprived of eternal existence. But this means that when they perished they would remain in death and corruption. For man is by nature mortal in that he was created from nothing. But because of his likeness to him who exists, if he had kept this through contemplating God, he would have blunted his natural corruption and would have remained [emeinen] incorruptible.14

Here we see that to be created from nothing necessarily means being mortal by nature, but such natural mortality does not necessarily imply that one will die. If human beings had kept the likeness of God, we would have remained incorruptible and would have lived eternally. As a result, the picture Athanasius paints of humanity’s created condition is neither one of static, natural immortality (as the forms possessed in Plato’s cosmology), nor one of human achievement of immortality, but one of an immortality given by grace, an immortality in which humanity was called to remain through obedience. Since the immortality given to humanity at creation was not natural but by grace, it follows that it could be lost. Athanasius continues this line of thought in On the Incarnation of the Word by writing: For God did not only create us from nothing, but he also granted [echarisato] us by the grace of the Word to live a divine life. But men, turning away [apostraphentes] from things eternal and by the counsel of the devil turning towards things corruptible, were themselves the cause of the corruption in death. They are, as I said above, corruptible by nature, but by the grace of the participation of the Word they could have escaped from the consequences of their nature if they had remained [memenēkeisan] virtuous. For on account of the Word who was in them, even natural corruption would not have touched them.15

Here again we see that at creation, humanity was both naturally mortal and immortal by grace, with this immortality connected to living a divine life. By not remaining in the immortality we possessed through participation in the Word, we became subject to the natural mortality that was ours because we were contingent, created beings. Athanasius depicts the fall as a turning away from God and from eternal things towards corruptible things. This idea of a ‘turning away’ (apostraphein or apostrophē) is one Athanasius has already developed at more length in Against the Pagans, and I now turn back to that work. 14 15

On the Incarnation of the Word 4 (Thomson, pp. 142–5), translation slightly modified. On the Incarnation of the Word 5 (Thomson, pp. 144–5).

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After describing creation in Against the Pagans, Athanasius writes: But men, contemptuous of the better things and shrinking from their apprehension, sought rather what was closer to themselves – and what was closer to them was the body and its sensations. So they turned [apestēsan] their minds away from intelligible reality and began to consider themselves. And by considering themselves and cleaving to the body and the other sense, deceived as it were in their own interests, they fell into selfish desires and preferred their own good to the contemplation of the divine.16

Here we see that the fall was primarily a matter of mankind’s changing orientation: Adam and Eve turned from the contemplation of God to thinking of themselves. Somewhat later, Athanasius continues by linking this initial change of orientation to the resulting sins: So they [human beings] put their hands to the opposite use and worked murder, they turned their ears to disobedience and their other members to adultery instead of legitimate procreation, their tongues to blasphemies and abuse and perjury instead of kind words, their hands again to stealing and assaulting fellow men, their sense of smell to varieties of exotic perfumes, their feet to haste in shedding blood, and their stomach to drunkenness and insatiable gluttony. All these things are evil and sins of the soul, but they have no other cause save the turning away [apostrophē] from better things.17

Here it is clear that individual sins result from the change of orientation that Athanasius has been discussing. The various components of the human being, and the various actions proper to them, should all be directed toward God. Early in its history, however, humanity turned away and redirected the components and actions in other ways. This turning away is the root cause of all subsequent moral sin. Athanasius’ treatment of creation and fall near the beginning of both Against the Pagans and On the Incarnation of the Word sets the stage for the way he describes both sin itself and redemption. For him, even though humanity’s being created necessarily involved being mortal by nature, the initial beatitude of humanity was one of real blessing and genuine immortality rather than merely potential. The fall was not merely the actualizing of tendencies already latent in creaturehood, nor was it the simple failure to achieve a task set before humanity. Rather, the fall was an active turning away, a preference to contemplate ourselves rather than God, and this turning away has marked humanity 16 17

Against the Pagans 3 (Thomson, pp. 8–9). Against the Pagans 5 (Thomson, pp. 12–13).

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and our actions ever since the fall. With this view of creation and fall as background, Athanasius sees actual sin as resulting from the primal change in orientation, the initial turning away. In the next section of this chapter, I will examine actual sin in Athanasius’ early writings.

The Nature of Sin If the fall was initially a turning from the contemplation of God to the consideration of self, then subsequent sin consists of the various ways in which that reorientation manifests itself. Athanasius refers to these manifestations as the ‘invention of evil’ and links them to idolatry. Let us now explore these concepts, in Athanasius’ understanding.

Sin as the ‘invention of evil’ In Against the Pagans 7, just after insisting (in a passage quoted earlier) that evil is not a self-subsistent reality, Athanasius claims: ‘But men, rejecting the notion of the good, began to think up for themselves and invent [anaplattein] objects which do not exist as fancy struck them.’18 He then gives an illustration of someone who shuts his eyes, imagines a non-existent darkness (non-existent because it is actually daylight, so he could see if he opened his eyes), and stumbles around in the ‘dark’. Athanasius then writes: In similar fashion the soul of men, shutting the eye through which it could see God, imagined [epenoēsen] evil, and moving therein did not realize that, although it thought it was acting, it did nothing at all, for it was inventing [anaplattetai] non-existent things. And it did not remain as it had been made but appeared such as it had defiled itself. For it was created in order to see God and be enlightened by him; but instead of God it pursued corruptible things and darkness.19

Here the idea of inventing non-existent things may have a Platonic ring to it, as if Athanasius is defining evil merely as the absence of good. But there is more going on here than that. When we shut our eyes, what we see with our imagination is not normally things that have no existence at all, but rather things that 18 19

Against the Pagans 7 (Thomson, pp. 18–19). Ibid.

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are not actually before us at the moment. The point is not that there is no such thing as darkness, but rather that it is not actually dark when we fancy it to be dark with our eyes shut. It is not so much that things we imagine (events from our lives, people we know, places we have been, etc.) are completely void of reality. The point is rather that they are not really there, or not really happening, at the moment we envision them. In other words, what we imagine is a world that does not correspond with actual reality. This, it seems, is Athanasius’ understanding of what happens when human beings re-orient their lives around themselves rather than God. We imagine a world in which we are, or something else is, the centre of the universe. But we are not the centre; God is. Thus, evil – as inventing non-existent things – is not mere absence. It is more like one’s choosing to believe in a parallel universe that is not real. No amount of imagining oneself or someone else or something else to be the centre of the universe can actually displace God as the true centre. In that sense, placing ourselves at the centre constitutes an act of inventing things that are not real. In the next chapter, Athanasius continues this line of thought: Not satisfied with the invention of evil, the human soul began gradually to regress to worse things. For learning of the diverse forms of pleasure and girded with the forgetfulness of things divine, taking pleasure in the passions of the body and only in things of the moment, it paid regard to opinions about them and thought that nothing existed other than visible phenomena, and that only transitory and bodily things were good. So perverted, and forgetting that it was made in the image of the good God, the soul no longer perceived through its own power God the Word, in whose form it had been created, but turning outside itself it regarded and pictured non-existent things.20

In this passage we see very clearly the idea of sin as the creation of an alternate universe. It is certainly not the case that bodily pleasures and things of the moment do not exist, that the human mind invents them out of thin air. What is the case, though, is that these pleasures are different from and less than the pleasure that comes from contemplation of God. When we not only immerse ourselves in bodily pleasures and things of the moment, but even delude ourselves into thinking that nothing else exists besides them, we have created an alternate universe. This is what Athanasius means by ‘inventing non-existent evil’. At this point it is worth pausing for a moment to consider how prescient is Athanasius’ thought on this point. In Western society today we see – in a way that Athanasius surely could never have imagined – an entire generation 20

Against the Pagans 8 (Thomson, pp. 18–21).

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of people who believe not only that they can construct their own alternate universes, but even that they can spend most of their lives in these parallel universes, utterly without regard to the question of whether such universes correspond to anything ‘out there’, in ‘the real world’. Not only do many people fail to recognize the primacy of spiritual reality today; many discount even physical reality when it is inconvenient or unflattering to their sense of self, and they re-invent themselves through avatars living in virtual worlds. Athanasius was far more prophetic than he could possibly have guessed, and today we are seeing the end results of ‘inventing non-existent evil’. Athanasius then moves from the invention of evil to the fabrication of gods. He writes: ‘The prime cause, therefore, of idolatry is evil. For since men learned to imagine evil which had no reality, similarly they also invented for themselves non-existent gods.’21 Athanasius cites Romans 1.25 (worshipping and serving the creature rather than the creator), and then in the next chapter, he claims: ‘Once men’s minds had turned away from God, they became degraded in their thoughts and reasonings, and paid the honour due to God first to heaven and the sun and moon and stars, thinking them not only to be gods but also the causes of things other than themselves. Then, descending lower in their obscure arguments, they called the ether and the air and the things in the air gods.’22 This argument provides a stepping stone to the major discussion of the work, in which Athanasius witheringly criticizes the pagan Greeks and Romans for fashioning images of created matter and worshipping those images as gods.23 One could regard this long argument as an extended meditation on Romans 1.18-32. In his festal letter for the year 330, Athanasius describes yet one more result of the construction of alternate universes. He describes evil-doers in these words: ‘Thus, being changed into the likeness of fools, they fell so low in their understanding, that by their excessive reasoning, they even likened the Divine Wisdom to themselves, thinking it to be like their own arts.’24 Not only is it the case that sinners ignore divine reality and focus on human or bodily reality, but we even trivialize divine wisdom by thinking it comes from ourselves, rather than recognizing its true source in God. Stepping from Athanasius to our current situation, we need to recognize yet again how poignant his criticism is today. Civilized cultures may perhaps

21 22 23

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Against the Pagans 8 (Thomson, pp. 20–1). Against the Pagans 9 (Thomson, pp. 22–3). Against the Pagans 9–27 (Thomson, pp. 22–75). This long section is similar to Augustine’s later – and much longer – criticism of pagan gods in The City of God, books 1–10. Festal Letter 2.3 (NPNF, second series, 4:510–11).

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regard idolatry as the error of the ignorant. We think only very primitive societies could make idols of wood or stone (to say nothing of raisin bread – see Hos. 3) and worship them. We, in contrast, would never make gods out of something we have made. And yet, when Athanasius declares that the creation of alternate universes and the proclamation that they constitute the only reality is in fact idolatry, we fall under the umbrella of his criticism just as much as the pagans of his own day. If the essence of idolatry is to worship non-existent gods rather than worshipping the true God, then cultures which say that mankind is the highest reality are making mankind into a false god just as thoroughly as cultures which make their gods of wood. Indeed, one could argue that worshipping oneself is even more deluded and sinful than worshipping something one has made. Accordingly, Athanasius’ treatment of the nature of sin prevents us from minimizing that sin by associating it merely with acts of immorality (however these are perceived or enumerated). At heart, sin is imagining a parallel world and seeking to live in that world as if it were real. Such a world – in which we or the works of our hands are ultimate – does not exist, not because we and the works do not exist but because we and our works are not ultimate. Pretending that such a world corresponds to reality is the essence of evil. The various acts that we habitually describe with the word ‘sin’ are results of this fundamental sin, a sin that amounts to idolatry.

Sins deriving from the invention of evil In Athanasius’ understanding, turning away from God results in both the reign of death and corruption over the human race and the increasing commission of obvious wickedness. In On the Incarnation of the Word 5, Athanasius writes: Since this [the fall] happened, men died, and corruption thenceforth took a strong hold on them, and was more powerful than the force of nature over the whole race, the more so as it had taken up against them the threat of God concerning the transgression of the law. For in their trespasses men had not stopped at the set limits, but gradually moving forward, at length had advanced beyond all measure. In the beginning they had been inventors of evil and had called upon themselves death and corruption; and in the end they turned to vice and exceeded all iniquity, and not stopping at one wickedness but inventing ever more new things, they became insatiable in sinning.25 25

On the Incarnation of the Word 5 (Thomson, pp. 144–7).

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The passage makes clear that death and corruption are consequences of the original ‘invention of evil’. Originally, whether humanity remained in grace, life and incorruption depended on our remaining oriented toward God. When we changed our orientation and invented evil by regarding ourselves or something else as the centre of the universe, we created a parallel universe in which life does not depend on remaining in God. But such a universe is not real; life does depend on participation in God. By creating such a false universe, we subjected ourselves to the death and corruption that could be avoided only through a relationship with God. Athanasius follows this passage immediately with a long list of moral sins, thus showing that such vices also derive from the reorientation of humanity away from God.26 The ‘derivative sins’ stemming from idolatry include all the usual suspects (murder, violence, lawlessness, etc.), but there is also one major surprise in Athanasius’ catalogue of vices: heresy. In his festal letter for the year 330, he describes the role of the serpent in using divine words with evil intentions, and he continues: ‘But after him and with him are all inventors of unlawful heresies, who indeed refer to the Scriptures, but do not hold such opinions as the saints have handed down, and receiving them as the traditions of men, err, because they do not rightly know them nor their power.’27 In Against the Pagans 6, Athanasius elaborates further: As for the heretics, falling away from the church’s teaching and making shipwreck of the faith, these, too, erroneously suppose evil to have its own separate existence. They invent [anaplattontai] for themselves, in addition to the true Father of Christ, another god, the unbegotten maker and author of evil and the demiurge of creation.28

Notice in this passage that Athanasius uses the same word ‘invent’ to describe the heretics that he has used to describe the original fall of humanity. Heretics invent another god and thus construct an alternate universe that does not correspond to reality. In this passage, Athanasius has the Marcionites in mind,29 but he will later apply the same reasoning to the Arians who, in effect, create a different Son who does not correspond to the true Son of God. Most people today would balk at placing heresy in the same category as 26 27 28 29

On the Incarnation of the Word 5 (Thomson, pp. 146–7). Festal Letter 2.2 (NPNF, 2nd series, 4:511). Against the Pagans 6 (Thomson, pp. 14–15). This group emerged in Rome in the 140s and held to the belief in two separate gods: a lower, evil god who created the physical universe and authored the Old Testament, and a higher, spiritual God who sent Christ into the world as his representative.

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obvious moral vice, but we should perhaps consider the reasons behind our hesitation. At heart, many modern (and especially postmodern) people do not really think that heresy is particularly significant because they do not think doctrine is very important. But for Athanasius, the salvation of the world hinges on who Jesus Christ is in relation to the Father, and conservative Christians today should agree with him. Therefore, if the church is to proclaim the real Christ – who alone can really save us – it must proclaim him correctly, describing him as equal to and of the same substance as the Father. To describe him some other way would be to preach a false Christ and would constitute the construction of a parallel spiritual universe that has no reality, and thus no salvific power. As uncharitable as Athanasius may be toward the intentions of Christian heretics, his portrayal of the effects of their proclamation is exactly right, and exactly in keeping with his portrayal of the fall and of sin more generally. To sin is to imagine oneself living in a different universe besides the real one, the one in which only God’s true Son can restore humanity’s lost relationship to God. Athanasius’ treatment of heresy in the same breath as other sins leads directly to his concept of the relation between sin and the Redeemer, to which I now turn.

The Relation between Sin and the Redeemer From Athanasius’ discussions early in Against the Pagans and On the Incarnation of the Word, it is clear that he sees the fundamental problem stemming from sin to be the loss of humanity’s share in the divine life and thus the loss of the immortality that followed from that participation. Thus, what redemption seeks to overcome is primarily corruption and mortality, rather than primarily guilt. At three points as he elucidates the depths of the human predicament in On the Incarnation of the Word, Athanasius asks: ‘What was God to do?’ His discussions in answer to this question demonstrate clearly his understanding of the relation between what sin is and who the Redeemer has to be. The first passage comes in Chapter 6. Athanasius asks whether God should allow corruption to hold sway over humanity. He answers: ‘So it was not right that he should permit men to be destroyed by corruption, because this was both improper [aprepes] and unfitting [anaxion] for the goodness of God.’30 Notice 30

On the Incarnation of the Word 6 (Thomson, pp. 148–9), translation slightly modified.

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here the use of the words ‘improper’ and ‘unfitting’ as Athanasius considers what God might have done in response to the human problem. It would not be appropriate for God to allow the crown jewel of his creation to perish. The second passage comes in the next chapter, when Athanasius asks whether God should have demanded repentance from humanity for the transgression. He answers: ‘But repentance would not have saved God’s honour [eulogon], for he would still have remained untruthful unless men were in the power of death. Repentance gives no exemption from the consequences of nature, but merely looses sins.’31 Whether or not one agrees with Athanasius’ claim that repentance by itself could loose sins, this passage makes clear that he sees the primary problem elsewhere. What dominates Athanasius’ thinking is corruption, mortality, the loss of the life that can only come through union with God. Also prominent is his concern for God’s honour. Just as it was not fitting for God to allow his creation to perish, so also it would not be fitting for God to go back on his promise that if human beings transgressed, they would die. The twin emphases on God’s honour and on the problem of corruption/ mortality lead Athanasius into two chapters of reflections on the Word’s incarnation as the honourable solution to the problem. Athanasius concludes that the only way to abolish corruption would be for everyone to die, and the Word was not able to die. So the Word ‘took to himself a body which could die, in order that, since this participated in the Word who is above all, it might suffice for death on behalf of all, and because of the Word who was dwelling in it, it might remain incorruptible, and so corruption might cease from all men by the grace of the resurrection’.32 Only the death of the incorruptible Word would suffice to abolish death for mankind that was perishing, and so the Word took upon himself a body through which he might suffer death for all. The third passage in which Athanasius asks what God should do comes in Chapter 13, and here he answers the question in a fuller way. He writes: What then was God to do, or what should have happened, except that he should renew again that which was in his image, in order that through it men might be able once more to know him? But how could this have been done, unless the very image of God were to come, our Saviour Jesus Christ? For neither by men was it possible, since they had been created in the image, nor by the angels, for 31 32

On the Incarnation of the Word 7 (Thomson, pp. 150–1). On the Incarnation of the Word 9 (Thomson, pp. 154–5). Here we see some anticipations of the way Anselm will later relate the problem of sin, the honour of God, and the death of God’s Son in his masterwork Why God Became Man.

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neither were they images. So the Word of God came in his own person, in order that, as he is the image of his Father, he might be able to restore man who is in the image.33

In this passage Athanasius articulates the crucial distinction between Christ and us, the distinction that enables him to be our Saviour. He is the ‘very’ image of God, whereas we are merely ‘created in the image’. This distinction between the uncreated and created images of God is crucial to Athanasian theology. Just as it is the case that only one who is immortal by nature can make us immortal, so also is it true that only one who is the uncreated image can renew us after the image. In Arius’ understanding, the Son is created as we are. If this were true, then according to Athanasius, such a Son could not save us, could not renew us after the image of God. Athanasius now turns his attention for the rest of On the Incarnation of the Word – and indeed for the rest of his life – to the truth that the Word, the Son of God, is just as eternal and uncreated as the Father is.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen from Athanasius’ early writings the understanding of creation, fall, and sin that undergirds his theology of the Trinity and his concept of the Incarnation. Human beings were created to share by grace in the divine Word and so to live the divine, incorruptible life that characterizes God. The fall was an act of turning away from that participation in God so as to orient human beings towards themselves. In consequence, subsequent sin is most fundamentally a matter of inventing evil, of concocting alternate universes in which we, rather than God, hold the preeminent position. And actual sins – whether moral vices or matters such as theological heresy – derive from this fundamental reorientation of the human outlook away from God. As we have journeyed with Athanasius through these ideas, we have seen that while his greatest contribution to Christian theology lies in the doctrine of the Son, he has great insights into the nature of sin as well. Indeed, his understanding of sin as inventing evil can be seen as almost prophetic of the situation we find in Western society today – in which virtual reality has been allowed to replace real reality in many people’s minds. Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude with two passages from Athanasius’ early festal letters, passages in which he uses the metaphor of food to describe 33

On the Incarnation of the Word 13 (Thomson, pp. 164–7).

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both sin and saintliness. In his first festal letter (for the year 329), Athanasius reflects on John 6.53 (in which Jesus affirms that he is the bread of life) by writing: ‘And as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, being heavenly bread, is the food of the saints, according to this; “Except ye eat My flesh and drink My blood”; so is the devil the food of the impure, and of those who do nothing which is of the light, but work the deeds of darkness.’34 And in his festal letter for 335, Athanasius again turns his attention to John 6, quotes Jesus’ statement in v. 53, and continues: ‘Now wicked men hunger for bread like this, for effeminate souls will hunger; but the righteous alone, being prepared, shall be satisfied, saying, “I shall behold Thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when Thy glory is seen by me” [Ps. 17.15].’35 To sin is at heart to feed on that which does not truly satisfy, that which is not ultimately real. In contrast, to be saintly is to feed on Christ, the one who alone can truly satisfy.

34 35

Festal Letter 1.5 (NPNF, 2nd series, 4:508). Festal Letter 7.5 (NPNF, 2nd series, 4:525).

11

Augustine Jesse Couenhoven

Augustine is known as the great theologian of sin. Many who read his Confessiones presume that the testimony offered there is a confession in our sense of the term, a litany of guilt. For this he has been celebrated as a realist and criticized as a pessimist. What modern readers often miss is the deeply humane source and character of Augustine’s views about sin. We tend to think of Augustine, especially the mature Augustine, as a perhaps astute or perhaps grumpy observer of humanity whose setting in the midst of the slow demise of an empire provided ample material for reflection on the darker side of life. But Augustine’s doctrines of sin and evil were less a product of empirical observation than that picture suggests. He did, of course, believe that his hamartiology explained much of the human behaviour he saw. But he did not arrive at his views by aggregating particular observations into a general theory. Rather, he began with a doctrine of grace and a conception of the good. His ideas about evil and sin were driven by those commitments and laced with compassion for the plight of all those whose lives are a disappointment to them (though also with scorn for those who are self-satisfied). In his Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian, Augustine noted that talk about sin can have at least three referents. One might have in mind the primal sin for which Adam was responsible when he fell from his immature perfection – about which Augustine suggested that ‘he had nothing evil in him by which he was urged against his will to do evil. So from his sin he was free to hold back.’ Second, one might be interested in the penalty of that first sin, felt by the entire human race and indeed the world. Augustine called this the ‘evil that one does not but suffers’. Third, there is ‘sin that is itself also the punishment of sin’, by which Augustine meant original sin, the sin from which Adam’s progeny are not free to hold back.1 This chapter discusses how these three approaches to sin 1

Saint Augustine, ‘Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answer to

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are related in Augustine’s thought, though not in the order in which Augustine named them. I begin with the second referent of sin-talk just mentioned and then turn to the first and the third. A key argument in this chapter is that Augustine’s views about sin and evil are derived from his views about grace and goodness. Given his ways of thinking about the latter, the former follow. Keeping this fact in mind may or may not make Augustine’s views easier for modern readers to love, but it can help to avoid some common misunderstandings. A second major contention is that Augustine’s ontology of evil as a privation should shape the way we understand Augustine’s claims about sin. This point is developed in conversation with Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, which applies his privation account to moral psychology, and in conversation with Augustine’s doctrine of primal sin, which has more in common with his understanding of original sin than is commonly realized.

The Evil we Suffer: Augustine’s Privation Account Evil has a complex relationship to sin in Augustine’s thought. Augustine believed that all evil is a result of sin. The first evils, which contributed to all the others, are the devil’s revolt against God and the ensuing fall of Adam and Eve. Because sin is the initial form of evil, sin has a kind of priority among evils. Yet sin also falls under evil as a species of that genus. Thus, in order to understand Augustine’s view of sin it is helpful to consider how he thought about evil more generally. Augustine believed that awareness of one’s imperfections creates the opening needed for a sinner to be receptive to grace. This epistemic function of sin gave it prominence in Augustine’s writing about salvation. The shape of Augustine’s thought looks different, however, when we attend to his metaphysics. Once Augustine had overcome his attraction to the Manichean belief that the universe is a battleground between two equal forces of good and evil, he became an adherent of the Christian doctrine of creation. According to that doctrine the world is not balanced between powers but asymmetrical. There is just one God, who created all things good. This implies that whatever is natural, is good.2 It

2

the Pelagians, Vol III, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, trans. Roland J. Teske, SJ (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999), p. 73. It is not quite right to summarize Augustine’s view by saying, as people sometimes do, that whatever is, is good, because Augustine did not deny evil’s reality.

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also means that, far from being a serious ontic competitor to the good, evil is always secondary. Evil lacks genuine creativity of its own, and must live like a parasite off its host. Evil can exist only by twisting what is good. The world can be perfectly good, therefore, but it cannot be perfectly evil because evil needs the good.3 Likewise, a person can never be completely sinful. Augustine’s view that evil is ontologically derivative is known as his privation account of evil. On this account, for something to be evil is for it to lack goodness. Augustine recognized, of course, that there are many good things that lack other goods; he offered the night as one example, because it is lacking in light yet is not evil.4 Thus, on Augustine’s account, for something to be evil is not merely for it to lack goodness, but to lack a kind of goodness natural to it, which God designed it to have. Things can be condemned as evil, he wrote, only when they are not what they ought to be.5 The implication is that although all evils are privations, not all privations are evil. Evil is a privation of a particular sort, one that violates the proper functioning of the thing that is corrupted. Because he believed that all virtues are properly described as forms of love, Augustine’s central example of such a corruption was loves that have been twisted so that they no longer serve the good of lovers or beloved. It is well known that among Augustine’s motives for subscribing to this privation account was the fact that it distances God from evil. If evil is a corruption of what is natural and good, then it is clear that God does not directly create evil but only permits evil to exist. Augustine considered this relationship between God and evil fitting because he considered it antithetical to divine holiness for God to be the direct agent of evil. It is important to clarify, however, that the privation account was only one part of Augustine’s theodicy and an introductory part at that. On the privation account, God has an indirect relationship to evil and because of God’s oversight of all things God remains responsible for permitting evil. By itself, therefore, the privation account does not solve the problem of evil. It is not meant to. Contrary to what some claim, Augustine did not believe that the privation account of evil implies the non-existence of evil. The privation account does not seek to save God from criticism by saying that evil is not a genuine reality – an implausible claim to which Augustine was certainly not attracted. 3

4 5

Saint Augustine, ‘Concerning The Nature Of Good, Against The Manicheans’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Albert H. Newman (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2009), p. 600. Ibid., p. 609. Saint Augustine, ‘On Free Choice of the Will’, in Augustine: Earlier Writings. The Library of Christian Classics, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953), p. 196.

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Rather, the privation account was meant to clarify the kind of reality evil has. Augustine recognized its power but also its weakness, since he insisted that evil is non-essential, and always a way of being less rather than more. Augustine only took up questions about theodicy after he had identified what counts as evil. Once his privation account was in place, Augustine made the further argument that God is justified in permitting that which he had identified as evil. The justifications Augustine offered included the claim that God only permits evil when it is necessary for a greater good, such as free will, pedagogy, or the unique relationship with God possible in salvation. He also argued, however, for epistemic humility, because human minds cannot always understand God’s rationale for permitting evil. Given these convictions, Augustine concluded that we should not blame God for allowing evil to exist. It should be clear that the main work in Augustine’s theodicy was done not by the privation account but by the other arguments I have mentioned. Thus, it may be better to think of the privation account of evil as pre-theodic rather than part of Augustine’s theodicy proper.6 Augustine’s privation account has for so long been associated with theodicy that it is sometimes forgotten that he found the privation theory appealing not only because it situates God in relation to evil but also because it situates what God created in relation to evil. A second motivation for Augustine’s commitment to the privation account was that it helped him define what is and is not evil for creatures (and, correspondingly, what is and is not sin). For instance, in a discussion of whether it is fair to blame Satan for being evil, given that the devil now sins necessarily, Augustine argued that the only barrier to blaming the devil would be if he was evil by nature.7 Augustine’s proposal was that because evil is contingent, a violation of the good for which a being exists, what is evil for a person must be ontologically non-necessary for that person. Even when a person is evil through and through, that is not a fact about that person’s essential nature, but a disordering of it. This claim has implications that only sometimes receive proper attention. One relatively well-known implication of Augustine’s privation account is that evil diminishes rather than empowers. We do evil with a desire for some good but evil by its very nature cannot deliver what it promises. That is why evil, and 6

7

For a helpful discussion of this point, see Donald A. Cress, ‘Augustine’s Privation Account of Evil: A Defense’, Augustinian Studies 20 (1989): 115–17. For an overview of Augustine’s mature theodicy, see Jesse Couenhoven, ‘Augustine’s Rejection of the Free Will Defence: An Overview of the late Augustine’s Theodicy’, Religious Studies 43 (2007): 279–98. Saint Augustine, The City of God (XI–XXII), trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2013), pp. 15–16.

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evildoing, is a kind of weakness, even when it takes the form of arrogance and lust for power. A less discussed implication of his account is that negative experiences that we often call evil may be so only in the broad sense in which there is something bad about anything we experience and dislike. Theologians and philosophers are typically more interested, however, in a narrower sense of the term, where something is evil if it ought not be. When we consider the term with that more specific meaning, Augustine’s privation account seems to imply that pain is not necessarily an evil. Pain is not evil, narrowly construed, because it is part of the proper functioning of embodied beings to experience at least some pain when they encounter their environment in certain ways. The ability to experience pain – whether that be the pain of a stubbed toe, or the experience of frustration when a complex task cannot be performed as well as one might like – is a fact of finitude, part of the natural order created by God. Thus, it is good. How exactly this claim should be developed is a topic for a different essay, but the general point about the limits of evil is worth noting. We saw above that the privation account does not mean that every kind of lack is evil, since this would imply that anything that is not God is, by definition, evil. We can now extend that insight to the claim that that not everything that is negative for a being is evil. What is evil, rather, is what impedes a being’s ability to achieve the sort of good appropriate to the kind of being that it is. Such impediments could come from having too much. Cancer, for instance, is an impediment to human well-being because it is cell growth that is out of control. Cancer thus is a corruption and disorder that is too much of a good thing, which counts as privation on Augustine’s theory. Privation accounts have come in for a good deal of criticism in recent years.8 Once the confusions about Augustine’s views mentioned above are out of the way, the main question the privation account faces is what exactly it means to claim, as Augustine did, that evil is ‘the absence of good’.9 A strong reading of this claim can seem implausible. It goes against common sense to claim that all evils are to be understood simply as a lack of positive attributes. Take the evil of an experienced sadist, for instance, one who has found a stable job as a torturer. Such a person will certainly be lacking many positive attributes, but such evil also seems to require us to say something about the qualities the torturer has. It is not enough to say that the torturer is not compassionate or caring, for 8

9

For an overview, see Todd C. Calder, ‘Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?’, American Philosophical Quarterly 444 (4) (2007): 371–81. Saint Augustine, ‘Enchiridion’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. EerdmansPub. Co., 1993), p. 240.

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instance, because a torturer is hardly alone in being deficient in those qualities. What makes the torturer special is the ‘positive’ qualities such a person has, such as the knowledge required to harm without killing, and the structures of mind and desire required to take pleasure in destroying a person face to face. The torturer is hard to understand if we speak only of what such a person is missing. Given the active and perversely generative forms that evil can take, a weaker reading of Augustine’s claim, which allows that the absence of good can come in many forms, seems more attractive. And, indeed, I have already claimed that Augustine’s privation account does not merely associate evil with ontological lack or the psychologically negative, and that it is able to associate the idea of privation with that of problematic excess. On this view, the key insight in Augustine’s claim that evil is the absence of good is the metaphysical claim that for something to be evil is for it to be at odds with God’s designs for that thing. Augustine metaphorically associates evil with a wound or sickness because of the way evil impairs the proper functioning of the being whose powers it perverts. On a sympathetic reading, Augustine did not intend to claim that each particular instance of evil should be thought of only in terms of a not-being. One way to clarify this is to suggest that on Augustine’s privation account describing a particular evil in terms of the goods that it is missing is necessary but may not be sufficient. Since the privation account claims that evil always involves corruption of the goods natural to creation, it will always be the case that whatever particular evil we have in mind will involve missing out on goods proper to the being in question. It is not necessary, however, to maintain that each particular evil is nothing more than such a corruption.10 Evils might very well take on quite particular forms that we will find it helpful to describe in ‘positive’ terms. Thus, we could say that a torturer is able to be evil only because of a lack of compassion and regard for others, but also note that the talented and effective torturer develops qualities like the enjoyment of other’s pain and a perverse kind of empathy for how to manipulate others.

He was Free to Hold Back: Augustine’s Account of Primal Sin Since the focus of this essay is on Augustine’s doctrine of sin rather than his conception of evil per se, I will forgo further inquiry into Augustine’s privation 10

A similar approach is described in Cress, ‘Augustine’s Privation Account of Evil: A Defense’, pp. 109–28; Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Barth on Evil’, Faith and Philosophy 13 (4) (1996): 584–608.

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account. Let us now consider the implications of Augustine’s approach to evil for his doctrine of sin. The implications of Augustine’s privation account for his view of sin are relatively straightforward, but Augustine himself did not always highlight them, so it may be illuminating to point them out. We have seen that Augustine thought of sin as a particular kind of evil. Some evils function as divinely imposed punishments; sin, by contrast, is evil that deserves blame and punishment. Sin deserves blame, Augustine thought, because it is an evil that resides in the volitional capacity of a personal agent. For the sake of simplicity I will refer to that volitional capacity as the heart and mind, but we should not forget that Augustine did not think of these as separate powers but rather different ways of looking at one thing. When evil is located in the heart and mind it is culpable, and therefore sin. Non-personal creatures may have a variety of evils, but Augustine believed that they cannot sin (or go to hell) because they lack the agential status required to do so. To be sinful is to have one’s mind and heart – and the powers of belief, desire and love associated with them – warped in such a way that they are at odds with the plans God has for the perfection of one’s self. To sin is to act in a way that is at odds with the divine design, which typically harms not only the world in which one acts, but the heart and mind of the actor as well. In other words, sin is bad not only because it defies God, but also because it actively misrelates to the good of others and to one’s own good. Both Augustine’s theodicy and his privation account required that God not be the direct agent of evil, so he found it fitting that evil’s genesis was in the power of created agents. The first evil was the first sin, the devil’s desire to follow his own light rather than God’s, soon followed by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. That primal sin, Augustine believed, had cosmic implications, since it unleashed all the evils now extant. Thus, although not all evil takes the form of sin, sin is the most fundamental form of evil and its source. Augustine famously found the primal sin inexplicable. From an early point in his career, in his attacks on his former Manichean beliefs, Augustine contended that what makes sin possible is the fact that created agents are unlike God in their ability to fall back into nothing. God’s absolute perfection means that it is not possible for God to become less than God is. That is the metaphysical reason why God cannot be evil. Things are otherwise for humans and angels. Those who were created out of nothing can fall back into nothing; the possibility of failing to flourish is a necessary part of their ontology as contingent beings. However, this ontology does not make a fall into sin necessary. As a result, Augustine’s ontology helped him to explain only the condition of the possibility

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of sin. The actuality of sin remained inexplicable. Although it is true that God did not act to make sin impossible, the Augustinian ontology just described suggests that the only way for God to have done so would have been to unite humanity to Godself from the beginning. Augustine offered a reason why God did not do so: God did not want to take all the drama out of creation. God intended to confirm humanity in the good, and give them eternal life, if Adam and Eve obeyed the command given to them in the garden. At the same time, Augustine maintained that even in their state of innocence God did not leave Adam and Eve on a knife’s edge, teetering between good and evil. Indeed, Augustine believed that God could not have done so for two reasons. First, doing so would have been unsuitable to God’s goodness, because it would have been a way of leaving the first couple overly vulnerable to evil.11 Second, Augustine did not consider it psychologically possible for the first couple to be in what he called an ‘intermediate’ position. Their wills could not have been neither bad nor good. They had either to love righteousness or fail to love righteousness.12 Under the circumstances, God made them morally good or, as Augustine put it, following Ecclesiastes 7.29, ‘upright’.13 According to Augustine’s moral psychology, Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian agency had its source in a love for the good that was bestowed on them at the moment of their creation. He envisioned Adam and Eve acting out of a volitional structure in which love for God and love for themselves and others were properly ordered from the start. In other words, the first couple was endowed with an original righteousness. Not only did they not have to struggle with the disordered desires that Augustine called ‘carnal concupiscence’, they were born with a desire to obey God.14 Their praiseworthy volitional structure was not, however, habituated, and their original righteousness was immature, because Adam and Eve were intended to confirm themselves in the good (to some degree) by making right decisions and acting on them. This need for maturation meant that there was a definite psychological possibility of deviating from the good. To counter this possibility, Augustine suggested that God graciously supported Adam and Eve, not only by commanding that they act obediently and implying that they would be rewarded for doing so, but by giving them the mental and volitional power to hold fast to the good. So although Adam and 11 12

13 14

Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 45–6. Saint Augustine, ‘The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins and the Baptism of Little Ones’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answers to the Pelagians, vol. 1, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, trans. Roland J. Teske, SJ (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), pp. 99–100. Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 116–18, 496–7. Saint Augustine, ‘The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins’, pp. 104–5.

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Eve were ontically and psychologically capable of sinning, God had stacked the deck against the Fall, and it made no sense that they should have done so. There was no good reason for Adam and Eve to sin, and every reason for them to have followed the divine calling they received. They had no reason not to trust God, and their own natures inclined them to do so. This is why Augustine found the primal sin mysterious. It is sometimes thought that Augustine sought to explain the primal sin with his attempt to describe it as an act of pride made by free choice. However, as he matured, Augustine became more and more convinced that any attempt to understand the primal sin must fall short. Let us consider each of these characterizations of the primal sin in turn. Augustine consistently claimed that the primal sin must have been a sin of pride, in which the devil and the first couple acted out of contempt for God. As he wrote in The City of God: ‘Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city.’15 In making this claim he relied upon what was in his day a widely known Biblical passage from Sirach 10:13, which states that ‘the beginning of all sin is pride’. Augustine found it natural to understand the angelic fall, in particular, as a sin of pride because only an unlimited desire for more that sought to transcend the finitude of creation can explain how it was possible for such powerful and happy beings to contemplate revolting against God. This explanation of the primal sin is quite limited, however, since it remains unclear why beings who lacked nothing and should have been entirely happy would have been discontented with or contemptuous of God. Thus, while it is reasonable to describe the primal sin as proud, the sin itself remains mysterious and irrational. Those who were made to love God should not have found the prospect of defying God attractive, and pride should not have come naturally to them. Similarly, the claim that the primal sin was an act of free choice has limited explanatory power. Indeed, Augustine came to think it was misleading, in a way. He often wrote that the primal sin was an evil choice, perhaps because he thought of it that way when he first articulated his famous free will theodicy in On Free Choice of the Will. However, Augustine emphasized in his mature works that the primal sin was an attitude before it was a choice expressed in action.16 Adam and Eve flirted with desires that would not have been attractive to them had their hearts not already been turned to sin before they actually chose to 15 16

Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 136–7. Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 116–21.

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disobey. Their faulty attitude towards God’s command was not the subject of a choice, as if upon hearing the serpent’s temptation Adam and Eve decided that it would be appealing to doubt God. They simply found themselves doubting God. In doing so they sinned, and found that they could not go back. Thus, Augustine’s mature view was that the first couple acted out of their fundamental orientation of love for God right up until they did not. The language of ‘fall’ is peculiarly appropriate for this take on what happened in the primal sin, since the Fall was not so much an act of choice in which they were in control, choosing their destiny, as a state of mind in which Adam and Eve happened to find (or, indeed, lose) themselves. Augustine had no explanation to offer concerning why it would suddenly make sense to them that God’s law should be violated, so their sin remained bizarre. Augustine highlighted this fact with his suggestion that the primal sin had a ‘deficient’ cause, which implied that the Fall was more a case of their hearts and minds malfunctioning than it was an act of genuine freedom.17 We might wonder why Augustine sometimes called the primal sin a ‘free choice’ (liberum arbitrium), if it lacked a proper explanatory relationship to Adam and Eve’s psychology. One possibility is that this was a topic about which he changed his mind. I have argued that Augustine abandoned the free will defence in his late anti-Pelagian works (those written after 412) because he came to think that it was theologically inappropriate to suggest that the God who saves by grace started human history off by asking human beings to set their own ultimate state.18 In his Unfinished Work Augustine cuttingly proffered the Fall as the premier example of the libertarian freedom celebrated by Pelagius. If this is what an undetermined freedom leads to, Augustine suggested, we are better off without it.19 Augustine, by contrast, did not ground the possibility of the Fall in an innate volitional power for choosing among alternatives. Rather, he saw the Fall as a faulty act of will, a view that fitted naturally with his privation account. A second possibility, compatible with the one just mentioned, is that (at least in the works Augustine wrote after he began to develop his doctrines of original sin, operative grace and predestination, by 396) Augustine referred to the Fall as a ‘choice’, not in an attempt to explain the primal sin but to more clearly locate the type of evil that it was: one located in the minds and hearts of personal agents. As we have seen, he did not believe that reference 17 18 19

Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 41–4, 45–6. Couenhoven, ‘Augustine’s Rejection of the Free Will Defence’, pp. 285–6. Saint Augustine, ‘Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian’, pp. 108–9, 111.

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to a free choice could explain the Fall, since in order to make sense a choice has to fit an existing agential volitional structure, which falling into sin did not. Reference to a choice could, however, act as a reminder that the first evil was volitional even if it was not the act of autonomous self-control Milton portrayed it as. This naturally leads to another question about Augustine’s mature treatment of the primal sin. If that sin was not a libertarian free choice but a surd that happened to the primal sinners as much as it was done by them, why should they be blamed for it? Although there is not room here to engage the full complexity of Augustine’s ideas about freedom and responsibility, I want to suggest that Augustine had a thoughtful answer available to him. Augustine’s mature view was that personal agents are accountable for the features of their hearts and minds and can be praised or blamed for their content. This is not because they control their hearts and minds, in the sense that they have the power to choose what will be in their hearts and minds, and thus to choose who they will be. To the contrary, Augustine increasingly saw human persons as dependent beings with porous selves, who receive their identities from God and the other people around them. Adam and Eve are an excellent example, since at the moment of their creation Augustine considered them quite virtuous and praiseworthy. This was not because they had chosen their innocent perfection. God had chosen that state for them. Given their circumstances, Adam and Eve were admirable without having made themselves so. Their righteousness was a gift. Augustine considered them deserving of praise simply because their beliefs and loves were good. Put more broadly, Augustine’s claim was that human agents are accountable for what they own, and that persons own their hearts and minds, which make us who we are as persons. Similarly, when Adam and Eve fell, they had ownership of their now fallen beliefs and desires. So while they may have lacked control over their fall into sin (as they had lacked control over their having been made with an original righteousness) they did not lack accountability for being fallen.20 Intriguingly, this view of the Fall – as a privation of Adam and Eve’s volitional goodness that they found within themselves without having chosen – paralleled Augustine’s conception of the original sin into which all of Adam’s race are born.

20

I develop these ideas further, in relation to Augustine’s doctrines of original sin and operative grace, in Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Chs 3–4.

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The Sin that is the Punishment of Sin: Augustine’s Account of Original Sin Once sin entered the world, Augustine believed, the human race was changed for the worse. Scripture taught that all of creation was harmed by the advent of evil, and cursed as part of God’s punishment of it. But the most ironic and fitting punishment was the fact that those who had sought to rebel against God now found that without God’s help their own bodies and souls rebelled against them. Augustine considered physical death the most obvious example of our inability to hold ourselves together. Far from exemplifying the power of autonomy, our bodies fall into decay. He often wrote about male sexuality as a more subtle example of this new dynamic. Sometimes men wish to be sexually aroused yet cannot, but at other times they are aroused when they do not want to be. These bodily failures are indicative of humanity’s internal state. Persons’ hearts and minds have become fractured and disorganized, and with beliefs and desires at odds it is hard to be content or to have self-control. The idea of original sin fitted in naturally at this point for Augustine, since he considered it appropriate for an attempt to be free from God to have been punished by enslavement to sin. It is important to note, however, that Augustine’s views about original sin were motivated not primarily by his ideas about punishment or his personal observations of human nature, but by his theology of baptism and his doctrine of Christ. All human beings are in need of Christ’s healing, he reasoned, so all human beings, even infants, must be wounded by sin. This line of thought was reinforced by the practice of baptizing infants, and the widespread belief, expressed in the Creed, that baptism is given for the forgiveness of sin. Since infants obviously do not sin in the active or intentional ways in which more grown up human beings do, Augustine thought their sin must be of a special sort. They must share, involuntarily, in Adam’s sin. That idea fitted Augustine’s soteriology, which developed the apostle Paul’s parallel between the solidarity Christians have in Christ and the solidarity humanity has in Adam. The elect are brought into Christ by God’s grace, a salvation that is necessary because of the seminal existence of all human nature in the first couple. Much as Christ’s righteousness is credited to the saints, the stain of Adam’s guilt infects everyone because of the unity of the human race. ‘We were all in that one man’ when he sinned, Augustine wrote.21 The guilt human beings share is not simply backward looking, however. It is also 21

Saint Augustine, The City of God, p. 79.

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predicated upon an echo of the primal sin that exists in every human born of Adam’s seed. Augustine believed that human beings are now born without a proper order among their loves. That makes postlapsarian humanity sinful from the start. Even when they are able to restrain themselves from acting unjustly towards one another, or themselves, their internal attitudes are characterized by carnal concupiscence – envy, lust for power, and other untoward desires. Infants, as Augustine famously suggested at the start of his Confessions with his image of a baby greedy for milk, share this inheritance.22 Baptism is given to bring a fallen humanity into relation with Christ, who not only forgives the guilt all share in common but heals the flawed second nature with which all are born. In Augustine’s thought, original sin in the two forms of shared guilt and carnal concupiscence are volitional evils from which human beings cannot escape without divine assistance. Original sin is original in the sense that it is an evil at the origins of human agency, and from which human agency flows. We act on our loves, and if our loves are flawed so too must we be. Famously, this means that sin is a necessary part of fallen human life. Even basic human goods, such as our social nature, have been perverted. Augustine often noted, in his Confessions and elsewhere, ways in which his friends had a negative influence on him by getting him involved in movements and activities that led him astray. Augustine did not, however, believe that all human goodness had been eradicated.23 That would have contradicted his privation account of evil. Human nature is corrupted, therefore, in the real but limited sense that human hearts and minds have been warped and twisted to the point that love is rarely, if ever, pure. The impurity of love that Augustine considered the basic form of sin often took the form of pride. In The City of God Augustine diagnosed the fundamental sin at the heart of the Roman Empire as pride, the hubris that led the Romans to accomplish great feats in the name of honor, but which inevitably led to the fall of empire as well, since it sought to be more than it could. Because of that book’s emphasis on sinful self-love, it is widely believed that Augustine thought sin always takes the form of a love of self not properly ordered by love of God. However, that interpretation is mistaken. In spite of the many similarities between the primal sin and original sin in Augustine’s thought, a signal difference between them is the fact that, as punishment, original sin highlights 22

23

Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, OSB, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), p. 43. See Saint Augustine, Revisions, ed. Roland J. Teske, SJ, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2010), p. 132.

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weakness and failure in a way that the first sin did not. Thus, it should not be a surprise to read Augustine’s statement that ‘Many sins are, after all, committed out of pride, but not every wrong action is done with pride. Many wrong actions are done by the ignorant, by the weak, and often by persons weeping and groaning.’24 Original sin is a state of bondage to evil that is self-imposed, in the sense that original sin is not forced upon a person from the outside but rather constitutes who a fallen person is from the start. It is not accidental that Augustine often used medical metaphors such as sickness, disease or plague to describe this condition. He recognized that often enough, his own sins were not intended to be such at the time when they were committed, but rather they were only recognized as such in retrospect once he had come to a deeper knowledge of himself and the good. It was misleading to speak of such involuntary sins as hubris. Sins done out of ignorance of the good, or out of desperate weakness of spirit by those who long for rest are not sins of pride. As a result, Augustine suggested that there is no one central form that sin takes. Pride is the beginning of all sin, but not its necessary form.25 This view of sin as many-sided and fragmented fitted naturally with Augustine’s claim that sin is a privation of the good. It may be that prelapsarian created agents, who were volitionally unified, and who loved an ordered and unified good, had only one avenue along which to oppose the good–pride. Postlapsarian agents, by contrast, are a mess. They love only haltingly and in part. They cannot order their loves, or fit them together. The sin that is a privation of these fractured goods might naturally take many forms, failing to be good in a variety of ways even while being good in others. Looked at in these ways, original sin is more pathetic and sad than the primal sin. Both certainly have devastating consequences, but the evils of original sinners are often quite small and miserable. This, Augustine believed, should give us compassion towards one another. Augustine’s claims about the necessity of sin can sound fatalistic. Because of the necessity of being healed in Christ it was clear to Augustine that no sinner can save him or herself. Augustine became embroiled in the Pelagian debates because of his philosophical development of that theological principle. As we have seen, his view was that human agents live out their loves. Because 24

25

Saint Augustine, ‘Nature and Grace’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answer to the Pelagians, vol. 1, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, trans. Roland J. Teske (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), pp. 241–2. See Jesse Couenhoven, ‘Not Every Wrong is Done with Pride: Augustine’s Proto-feminist Anti-Pelagianism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 61 (1) (2008): 32–50.

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postlapsarian human loves are flawed, human lives will necessarily be flawed as well. That is the psychological reason why human beings can live rightly only when God gives what God commands. This teaching equalizes all of humanity in dependence on grace, but it has seemed to many of Augustine’s modern readers that it does so only by undermining human agency. One reason not to see Augustine’s doctrine of original sin as fatalistic is that he did not believe in a psychological determinism according to which a person’s story is set by the cards dealt him or her at birth. God’s free and unpredictable grace is the ultimate disruptor of any such determinism, but even short of that Augustine believed that there were often cases where the resources of a person’s heart and mind would leave a variety of options underdetermined. Here there was room not only for chance – Augustine particularly mentions the way in which what comes into our thoughts is not always under our control – but for intentional shaping of self and others.26 Augustine’s polemics against the Pelagians did not offer a context for him to emphasize this latter theme, but the shape of his own life exemplified it. Augustine lived in community with friends who together practised a way of life that was meant to elevate them all, and to minimize temptations. Although they had no hope of fully eradicating the disordered loves with which they had been born as original sinners, they sought to be as good as they could under the circumstances. It is hard to deny that Augustine believed in the moral and spiritual superiority of his dedicated brothers, in spite of their imperfections. To a great degree the differences he saw between human virtues can be accounted for by his doctrine of grace, which did not require that God give equally to all. Augustine also believed that sinners have at least some control over how their sin is expressed. Thus he preached that Whatever we are commanded to do, we have to pray that we may be able to fulfill it; but not in such a way that we let ourselves go, and like sick people lie flat on our backs and say, May God rain down food on our faces, and we ourselves wish to do absolutely nothing about it; and when food has been rained down into our mouths we say, May God also swallow it for us. We too have got to do something. We’ve got to be keen, we’ve got to try hard, and to give thanks insofar as we have been successful, to pray insofar as we have not.27

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Saint Augustine, ‘The Gift of Perseverance’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answer to the Pelagians, vol. 4, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, trans. Roland J. Teske (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999), pp. 201–2. Saint Augustine, ‘Sermons (341–400)’, in The Works of Saint Augustine III/1, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, trans. Edmund Hill, OP (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), p. 99.

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A second reason to reject the claim that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is fatalistic is that even in cases where Augustine believed that human beings sin necessarily – for instance, in the attitudes of greed, envy or idolatry that postlapsarian human agents sometimes cannot avoid having – he argued that the sort of necessity at work is not one that undermines the importance of what is in each personal agents’ heart and mind, or that makes praise and blame useless.28 By itself, he insisted, necessity does not undermine responsibility. The question is what makes the necessity and how. Original sin is a necessity shaped by what is in each person; it is not coercively imposed from the outside. Since original sinners’ faults are their own defects of thinking, loving or acting, Augustine considered it entirely proper to rebuke them for their lack of character. Here it may be helpful to recall the earlier discussion of responsibility for the primal sin and original righteousness of Adam and Eve. Because human beings cannot create their own natures, Augustine considered it impious for a theory of moral and spiritual accountability to make responsibility depend on a power to choose one’s own identity. He suggested that human beings are responsible for the contents of their hearts and minds because persons own what they believe and love. On this view, the ability to choose is not the main criterion of responsibility. For Augustine, personal loves and beliefs are intrinsically the sort of things that can be praised and blamed, rewarded and punished. How we come by them is important, but it is not decisive.

Conclusion: Must We Talk about Sin? Augustine’s views about sin are sometimes attacked because interlocutors dislike the views Augustine had about specific activities or attitudes. For example, he is particularly supposed to have had problems with sex, although that claim is somewhat misleading. Augustine considered sexual lust a good example of the ways in which those who desire autonomy find themselves out of control, but he was not more concerned with sexual desire than lust for power or prestige. He did have ideas about sexuality that differ significantly from the views widely held today, but the same can be said for his austere views about eating or his strict rejection of lying. At any rate, it is quite possible to find insight in Augustine’s doctrine of sin whether or not we find insight in Augustine’s particular moral 28

Saint Augustine, The City of God (I–X), trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), pp. 156–8.

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stances. This distinction has sometimes been made by separating out discussion of particular ‘sins’ from a doctrine of ‘Sin’. Though there is mutual influence between how one thinks about particular sins and one’s general doctrine of sin, the two differ in significant ways as well. Thus, we should judge Augustine’s doctrine of sin less on whether we like his ideas about self-love, sexuality or ambition, than on the ways in which he developed his privation account, his soteriology, and his moral psychology. Even so, in a culture that values optimism it can be difficult for us to see anything to be excited about in a doctrine of sin. Why focus on the negative? Augustinians can offer a three part response. First, although our litany of sins tends to differ in important ways from Augustine’s – he did not typically chide his fellows for their failures to recycle, or for their sexism – we still have implicit ideas about evil that drive many of our responses to the world around us. We still blame and hold people accountable for various evils in which we believe them to be implicated. Therefore, we also have our own conceptions of sin – of culpable evil – that can be illuminated by conversation with Augustine, precisely because his thought world was quite different from ours. Second, I have argued that in Augustine’s hands the doctrine of sin is meant to serve the positive. Augustine’s doctrine of sin was provoked by his conception of the good and by his beliefs about the grace available through baptism and other means. His views about sin are often blamed for his stark vision of hell and damnation, but this assessment reads Augustine’s conceptual history backwards. Augustine developed his doctrine of sin in the light of the beliefs he held on ‘positive’ matters like the sacraments and the nature of salvation in Christ. His references to sin in his Confessions, for example, were often meant not to denigrate himself but to highlight God’s attempts to teach him, and to show the import of his own agency in contradistinction to the Manichean claim that the evil in his life was not his own. Augustine’s doctrine of sin sought to provide a logic that made sense of his other commitments about human nature. Third, the language of sin is less pejorative than is often claimed. Though Augustine should at times have spoken less harshly than he did, it is important not to overestimate how harsh Augustine actually was. His doctrine of sin was meant not merely to condemn but to diagnose our condition. He sought to follow in the steps of the great physician Jesus Christ by clarifying the nature of our deepest troubles, so that we might be able to see our avenues of hope more clearly. Unlike his theological opponents – moral elitists who believed that only a select few could purify themselves – Augustine trusted that by grace salvation is open to the many. Because the linchpin of his theology was divine forgiveness,

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he found it necessary to speak of the wounds God works to cure. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, in particular, was not meant to be callous. It is a moral psychology that depicts the tragedy of the universal human relationship with shocking and mundane evils that trap and diminish us. If he was right, the seemingly optimistic claim that individuals can and should renew their own hearts, minds and communities is actually a false hope, one that asks what the fallen cannot give, thereby adding to the burdens of the already afflicted. In his view, our true freedom lies in the gift of new life already offered to us by the one who made us. The deepest sin is to refuse to rest in this hope.

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Thomas Aquinas Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) was a member of the Order of Preachers, founded by Dominic Guzman at the beginning of the thirteenth century to preach doctrine and to care for souls through the administration of the sacrament of penance. When Thomas came to compose a comprehensive account of theology that the ‘teacher of catholic truth’ could use to train Dominican friars for these tasks, the Summa theologiae, he devoted the second of its three parts – arguably, the heart of the whole work – to a treatment of virtue and vice that could enable friars to be wise and compassionate spiritual guides.1 Though handbooks to help confessors in ‘handling sin’ (the title of one such work from the early fourteenth century) were common both before and after Thomas, the Summa offered something that was different from the typical manual inasmuch as, rather than being a standalone guide to various sins, it integrated the practical task of the care of souls with the more speculative task of unfolding the logic of Christian doctrine.2 In this way it not only drew together the two primary tasks of the Dominican friar, but it also offered an account of sin embedded within an account of the God who creates, redeems and brings to consummation. Thomas was also one of the thirteenth century’s greatest interpreters of Aristotle. More than a mere interpreter, Thomas was also an appropriator: following a venerable Christian tradition, he treated the truth found in Aristotle’s thought as Egyptian gold that rightly belonged to God’s people, to be used for the tasks of preaching, teaching and the care of souls. But more even than 1

2

See Leonard Boyle, The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982); M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow is Bent in Study”: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998). See John Inglis, ‘Aquinas’s Replication of the Acquired Moral Virtues: Rethinking the Standard Philosophical Interpretation of Moral Virtue in Aquinas’, Journal of Religious Ethics 27 (1) (Spring 1999): 3–27; Mark Jordan, Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 116–53.

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interpreter and appropriator, Thomas was an original thinker who performed a kind of alchemy on the gold of Aristotle. Or, to shift the metaphor to one that Thomas himself uses, rather than diluting the wine of theology with the water of philosophy, he transformed that water into the wine of Christian teaching.3 This can be seen perhaps most clearly in the second part of the Summa theologiae, where Aristotle’s account of moral excellence is fused with an Augustinian account of sin and grace to produce a rich and nuanced picture of the Christian life. It is within this account of the Christian life that we find one of Thomas’s most extensive treatments of sin.4 So in reading Thomas on sin, we need both to keep in mind the practical, pastoral intent of his writing, as well as to grapple with the Aristotelian subtleties and complexities of his account. While it would be possible to give an account of what Thomas thinks simply by reporting his views, a sense of how Thomas thinks can best be had by reading Thomas himself. But reading Thomas can be difficult for those unfamiliar with the content of his thought and the scholastic style of his writing. So in what follows, I will look at a single article from the Summa theologiae and offer commentary on it that will, I hope, unfold the basics of Thomas’s thinking on sin. The specific article is the sixth and final one in the seventy-first question of the first part of the second part of the Summa, which is the first question dealing with sin.5 In this article, having worked toward a basic account of what sin is, Thomas is struggling with a definition of sin that had been extracted from Augustine’s Contra Faustum – a definition that had achieved quasi-canonical status by the mid-thirteenth century in large part because of its inclusion in Peter Lombard’s Sentences.6 As we shall see, it is a definition that Thomas wishes to affirm, while recognizing that it poses a number of difficulties, which the opening arguments or ‘objections’ will serve to point out. Since these difficulties often have to do with the ways in which the Augustinian definition seems to depart from other things Thomas has already said about human action and sin, I shall use the article’s objections to establish the broader intellectual context in which Thomas understands sin. Of course, Thomas’s goal is to find a way of 3 4

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De Trinitate pars 1 q. 2 a. 3 ad 5. While here I focus on the Summa theologiae (1266–73, with the main section treating sin written in 1271), other extended accounts can be found in Scriptum super liberos Sententiarum (i.e. his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, 1252–6) lib. 2 dist. 30–44 and Quaestiones disputate De malo (c. 1270–2). Summa contra Gentiles (1259–65) has discussions relevant to Aquinas’ theology of sin scattered throughout the third book as well as in Chapters 50–52 of book four. Citations from the Summa theologiae will be given parenthetically in the text with part, question, and article. Translations are my own. Sententiae lib. II dist. 35, cap. 1.1.



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understanding this venerable definition that is compatible with his overall view of sin, so in his ‘response’ and the ‘replies’ to the objections we will see how he goes about rescuing the Augustinian definition from possible misunderstanding. Objection 1: It appears that sin is defined unfittingly by saying: ‘Sin is a word or deed or desire, contrary to the eternal law’ (peccatum est dictum vel factum vel concupitum contra legem aeternam), because ‘word’ or ‘deed’ or ‘desire’ involve an action. But not every sin involves an act, as stated earlier (I–II q. 71 a. 5). Therefore this definition does not include every sin.

The first objection concerns the possibility of a sin of omission: sinning not only in what I have done, but also in what I have failed to do. Thomas argued in the immediately preceding article that sins of omission are sometimes not actions. Yet the Augustinian definition focuses on actions, whether of speaking or doing or desiring, and therefore seems unable to account for sins of omission. The objection, in pointing us to sins of omission, also points us to how Thomas sees the need for the broader context of a life narrative in order to identify virtue or vice. In Summa theologiae I–II q. 71 a. 5, Thomas sketches two views of sins of omission. The first view says that there is always some act involved in a sin, even if it is only the interior act of willing not to do something, or to do something else instead of the thing one ought to do. The second view says that there is no need to posit such an act of the will, since the mere omission of the good act suffices for sin. So, on the first view, if I fail to go to church on Sunday, it is either because I willed not to go, or I willed to do something else, such as going out to brunch with friends; in either case there is an act of will that constitutes the sin. The second view, in contrast, says that one need not concern oneself with what the will is or is not doing; the failure to go to church when I ought is in itself a sin. As he often does, Thomas finds an element of truth in both views. If one is thinking of sin in terms of a particular act in itself, then the second view seems correct. If I stay up late drinking and sleep through church the next day, then at the moment I commit the sin I am not willingly doing a sinful act – indeed, I am not willingly doing anything at all, since I am asleep. At the same time, if we consider the sin of omission in a more extended sense, then it must be related to some act, for our omission must be caused in some way. If the cause of the omission is not something that I will (say an illness preventing me from getting out of bed), then there is no sin involved at all, since for Thomas it is only those acts that are voluntary that are subject to praise or blame (as we shall see below). If the cause of my omission is an earlier act of my will – such

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as my choice to go out drinking on a Saturday night – then that act is the cause of the omission, even though I am not actively willing at the time of the omission (since I am passed out). But, he concludes, the act that causes my sin of omission – excessive drinking – is not the same thing as the non-act in which my sin consists, since excessive drinking is obviously not the same as failing to go to church. So, speaking most strictly, there are sins of omission that are not acts. The larger implication of the discussion of sins of omission to which the objection points is that sin is a more complex reality that simply doing or saying things contrary to God’s law, and more complex even than desiring things contrary to that law. I can sin even when, at the point in time when the sin occurs, I am not saying or doing or desiring anything. This is because sin is not a matter of punctiliar words or deeds or desires, but of a life that is extended through time. Understanding this aspect of sin is crucial for those who seek to care for souls in the sacrament of penance, such as the Dominican friars for whom Thomas wrote the Summa. The skilled confessor, while attending to particular acts (and non-acts), also attends to the patterns of action and inaction in which particular acts find their place. This is also one reason why the Aristotelian account of virtue proves so useful to Thomas, since it speaks of moral goodness in terms of habits and dispositions acquired over the course of a life. My sin of omission is, as it were, a ‘gap’ that appears only within the context of a series of prior and subsequent words, deeds, and desires: promises that have been made, drinks that have been drunk, goods that have been yearned for. It is partly for this reason that the Augustinian definition’s focus on deeds, words, and actions could pose a problem. Objection 2: Augustine says in the book On the Two Souls: ‘Sin is the will to retain or obtain what justice forbids’ (11.15). But the will is included under desire (concupiscentia), in so far as ‘desire’ can be taken in a broad sense to mean any appetite. Therefore it would have sufficed to say ‘sin is a desire contrary to the eternal law’, and it was not necessary to add ‘word or deed’.

The force of this objection is as follows: since a definition aims at what is essential rather than accidental (i.e. contingent) about a thing, and since it is the orientation of the will that is the essential element in sin, there is therefore no need to include ‘words or deeds’ in our definition of sin, because willing is a form of desire or ‘concupiscence’. The objection points to an important aspect of the Augustinian tradition indicated by the quotation from On the Two Souls: the significance of the will in determining the morality of an action or



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a desire.7 Whether he was discussing the origin of sin in the Garden of Eden or the distinction of the two cities in history, Augustine gave primacy to the orientation of the will. As Augustine says in his Retractions: ‘it is by the will that we sin.’8 In this, Thomas follows Augustine, noting, for example, how the act of almsgiving, while good in itself, could be sinful if motivated by the vain desire for glory (I–II q. 17 a. 7 ad 2). The emphasis on the will found in both Augustine and Thomas departs from the Platonic tradition, for which evil actions arise from a cognitive error concerning the good. While Thomas does believe that human beings have by nature an appetite for the good (see below), he also believes that our appetite can be corrupted, due not only to a defect of the intellect – as when we sin through ignorance, thinking something good when it is not – or to a defect of our sense appetites – as when we sin through weakness, controlled by our emotions or ‘passions’ – but also through a defect of the will. In this last case, which Aquinas calls ‘malice’ (malitia), the will still has an appetite for the good, but it knowingly chooses a lesser good over a greater one (I–II q. 78 a. 1). All three sorts of defects – ignorance, weakness, and malice – are ‘wounds’ in human nature, consequences of original sin that damage human nature without entirely taking away its goodness (I–II q. 85 aa. 1–3). In discussing original sin, Thomas is the inheritor of two traditions: one found in Lombard’s Sentences that, drawing on Augustine, focuses on concupiscence as the essence of original sin,9 and another flowing from St Anselm that, also drawing on Augustine, speaks of original sin as the loss of ‘original justice’.10 The former sees the essence of original sin as the will’s inherited tendency to ignore due measure in desiring, a tendency that mirrors the first sin’s preference for created good over uncreated good, and which is passed on by the concupiscence involved in the act of sexual reproduction. The latter sees what is essential in original sin as not disordered desire itself, but humanity’s deviation from its original status as just before God, a justice that consisted in the subordination of human reason to divine wisdom. Following Alexander of Hales and others, Thomas splits the difference between these two approaches, saying that ‘formally’ original sin is the loss of original justice, but ‘materially’ it is concupiscence. What does this mean?

7

8 9 10

For the importance of the will in Augustine’s account of sin, see e.g. Augustine, De Civitate Dei lib. 14 cap. 6. Retractiones 1.9. Sententiae lib. II dist. 30. De conceptu virginali cap. 1.

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Thomas develops Anselm’s notion of original justice so as to see it as the original graced state of humanity characterized by the fitting subordination of human reason to God, the will to reason, and the body to the will (I q. 95 a. 1). When human beings turned from God and suffered the loss of grace, our nature was wounded by this loss of proper order, suffering ignorance, weakness, malice and, eventually, death (II–II q. 164 a. 1). Original sin is, Thomas says, ‘an inordinate disposition arising from the destruction of the harmony which was essential to original justice’ (I–II q. 82 a. 1). This harmony’s destruction plays itself out in the powers of the soul turning away from the eternal good of God toward the lesser good of creatures, a disorder that ‘may be called by the general name “concupiscence”’ (I–II q. 82 a. 3).11 In identifying original sin as a disordered disposition that issues in disordered acts, Thomas once again locates sin primarily in a life story and only secondarily in particular acts. Even in his account of the transmission of original sin, Aquinas downplays (but does not eliminate entirely) the role of lust in sexual intercourse, focusing more on the unity of the human race: ‘all those born of Adam may be considered as one person, inasmuch as they have one common nature, which they receive from their first parents … So original sin is not the sin of this person except inasmuch as this person receives his nature from his first parent’ (I–II q. 81 a. 1).12 As with a sin of omission, original sin is not an action that we engage in, but emerges from within a story of words, deeds and desires. Only in this case, it is not the words, deeds and desires of an individual, but of the human race as a whole. We might say that it is because human beings share a single story – the story of creation in the image of God and of primal human disobedience – that every person shares in the sin of Adam and Eve and suffers the wounds of ignorance, weakness, and malice that it effects. Objection 3: It appears that sin consists specifically in turning away from the end, for good and evil are considered chiefly with regard to the end, as explained above (ST I–II q. 18 a. 6). Therefore Augustine, in book 1 of On Free Will (cap. 11), defines sin in relation to the end, saying that ‘sin is nothing else than neglecting eternal things and pursuing temporal things’: and in the book Eighty-three Questions (30) he says that ‘all human evil is a matter of using what we should enjoy and enjoying what we should use’. But the proposed definition 11

12

For a brief discussion of views of original sin in the thirteenth century, see Pierre J. Payer, Bridling of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 43–50. For a discussion of how Thomas, particularly in his mature theology, differs from Augustine on the question of the transmission of original sin, see Mark Johnson, ‘Augustine and Aquinas on Original Sin: Doctrine, Authority, and Pedagogy’, in Aquinas the Augustinian, Dauphinais, David and Levering (eds) (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), pp. 145–58.



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makes no mention of turning away from our appropriate end. Therefore it is an insufficient definition of sin.

As is well known, Thomas’s approach to morality is a ‘teleological’ one, meaning that he interprets the goodness or badness of human action in terms of the end at which that action aims. Central to Thomas’s understanding of sin, and seemingly missing from the Augustinian definition found in the Contra Faustum, is the natural orientation of human beings toward the good as their proper end, and the disastrous consequences of turning away from that good. This teleological morality is part of a larger interpretation of reality that sees all things as moved by an appetite for divine goodness. Thomas, following Aristotle, defines goodness as ‘that which all things desire’ (bonum est quod omnia appetunt) (I q. 5, a. 1). While we might think of ‘appetite’ or ‘desire’ as something had only by sentient beings, Thomas sees everything that exists as having an appetite. Most fundamentally, all things desire or have an appetite to be the kind of being that they are and to behave in ways that accord with that being: a stone desires to move downward so as to rest on the ground, an eye desires to see things, a human being desires to know things. In other words, the ‘appetite’ of all things for the good serves Thomas as a way of talking about why it is that all things tend to act in ways characteristic of the beings that they are. To have that desire or appetite fulfilled – for the stone to rest on the ground, for the eye to see, for the human being to know – is to be ‘perfected’ or fulfilled as a particular sort of being. Here we can see the close connection Thomas makes between goodness and existence. In Thomas’s terminology, what all things desire is the actualization of their potential to be what they are by nature. The goodness of a thing is a function of its possession of the ‘fullness of being’ that a thing of its kind ought to have: the resting stone, the seeing eye, the knowing person. The most fundamental perfection of any being is the very act of existing, and in this sense ‘to be’ (in Latin, esse) is the most universal good, since every thing that is has an appetite for existence. Entailed in the particular goods of particular things – resting on the ground, seeing, knowing – there is the universal good of existing, and the source of this universally desirable good is what people call ‘God’ (cf. Thomas’s ‘fourth way’ of demonstrating God’s existence in I q. 2 a. 3). Thus all things, no matter how they seek to realize their particular kind of existence, have an appetite for God, who bestows upon each creature its esse. Thomas therefore says that God is the highest (or, we might say, most fundamental) good that all beings desire, the ‘last end’ that each being seeks to attain in its

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own distinctive way (I–II q. 1 a. 8). All other things, while good and therefore desirable, are, in view of this highest good, means to be used and not ends to be enjoyed. Evil, simply put, is the failure of a thing to be perfected in the way that is appropriate to the kind of thing that it is. Evil is a privatio boni or privation of good (I q. 5 a. 3 ad 2, q. 48 a. 1). An eye that cannot see is bad at being an eye because its potential as an eye is not actualized. The evil of blindness that is suffered by an ailing eye is simply the privation of the good that an eye should possess. ‘Sin’ names the kind of evil specific to human beings, how they fail to act in such away so as to attain the perfection or actualization or fulfilment of existence that is proper to them: the perfection of intellect and will that comes from knowing and loving God (see I–II q. 3 a. 8). It is the distinctively human way in which evil occurs. As the objection points out, it involves not simply a failure to attain the end, but a willful turning away or ‘aversion’ from the end. Inasmuch as the Augustinian definition is not framed in terms of this aversion, it seems inadequate as a definition of sin. Objection 4: Something is said to be prohibited because it is contrary to the law. But not all sins are evil because they are prohibited; some are prohibited because they are evil. Therefore sin in general should not be defined as being against the law of God.

Here we might hear an echo of the question of Plato’s Euthyphro: is something evil because forbidden by God or is something forbidden by God because it is evil? The view proposed in the objection is that at least in some cases sins are forbidden because they are evil, and would still be evil whether they were forbidden or not, so the Augustinian definition under examination fails because it defines sin in terms of a transgression of divine law. While the objection makes no explicit reference to earlier arguments by Thomas, it is clear that Thomas is not one who thinks that the law in itself determines the rightness or wrongness of an act. Martin Luther King cited Thomas in his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ in support of the view that an unjust law is not binding but can, and in some cases must, be disobeyed (I–II q. 96 a. 4). Not only is the human good not determined by human laws, it is also not determined by brute divine decree (as if God could decree that it is good for human beings to dishonour their parents or murder each other) but by the nature of what it means to be a human being. Therefore, so the objection goes, Augustine’s definition is problematic because of its focus on law. Though, as we shall see, Thomas will in his reply offer a defence of the Augustinian definition’s



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reference to eternal law, the objection usefully draws our attention to the fact that it is evil as a privation of the human good and not as the violation of law that is the primary framework within which Thomas understands sin. Objection 5: ‘Sin’ denotes a bad human act, as is clear from what has been said (I–II q. 71 a. 1). But ‘the evil of humans is to be against reason’, as Dionysius states in chapter four of On the Divine Names. Therefore it would have been better to say that sin is against reason than to say that sin is contrary to the eternal law.

This objection builds upon the previous one, proposing that rather than seeing sin as a violation of law, we should see it as a violation of reason. As with the previous objection, Thomas will in his reply offer a corrective to the view espoused here, but at the same time this objection gets something right about the general tenor of Thomas’s thought, particularly with regard to his understanding of the nature of human action. If evil is a privation of good, and sin is an evil human act, then we need to understand the distinctive way in which human beings are fulfilled or fail through their actions. In other words, to determine the nature of the human good we must ask, what makes a human act distinctively human? A human action is not simply any action that a human being engages in – such as having one’s pupils dilate or stumbling down a flight of stairs – but rather precisely those actions that are rooted in the distinctive human capacities of reason and will (I–II q. 1 a. 1). As we have already seen in discussing Thomas’s use of the term ‘appetite’, while the good is that which all things desire, the terms ‘desire’ and ‘appetite’ are used analogically by Thomas, which means that they are applied in related but non-identical ways to different sorts of beings, as a way of speaking of how they incline toward that which fulfils them. Human beings (and angels) incline toward good things precisely because their intellects grasp them as good and this inclination is what Thomas calls ‘rational appetite’ or ‘willing’ (see I q. 59 a. 1). Of course, not every action of a human being is a result of rational appetite and not every way in which a human might fail to act is a sin. If, because of some neurological failure, I cannot sense the flea that is biting me and so fail to itch it, this might indicate that I am an ill-functioning organism, but not that I am a bad human being, since my neurological failure is not a failure of that which distinguishes me as human, i.e. my reason and my will. It is not, in other words, a ‘moral’ failure. To fail morally is to fail in a distinctively human way, as a thinking and willing being; it is the failure to will in accord with right reason, to incline toward that which the intellect accurately identifies as good. Above all,

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it is the failure to incline toward God as that which reason grasps as the highest good, in relation to which all other goods are subordinate (I–II q. 1 a. 8). To fail to be united with God through knowing and loving God as our highest good is to fail as a human being, which for Thomas is to be a sinner. The Augustinian definition, by focusing on the eternal law, seems to leave reason out of the equation. As we shall see, however, Thomas thinks of law as an expression of reason, and therefore sees Augustine as implicitly including it in his definition. On the contrary, the authority of Augustine is sufficient.

The sed contra of an article of the Summa theologiae is typically quite brief and rarely makes an actual argument, preferring to cite an authoritative opinion. But this is even terser than usual. That the naked invocation of Augustine’s authority would suffice speaks both to the importance of authorities in theological argumentation (see I q. 1 a. 8 ad 2) and to the specific importance of Augustine. It serves to remind us that as much as he values reason, Thomas sees theology as grounded in our faithful assent to an authoritative word revealed by God, and as much as he values the insights of Aristotle into virtue and vice, Thomas knows that these pale in comparison with Augustine’s insights into the human heart wounded by sin and healed through grace. I respond: as is clear from what was said earlier (I–II q. 71 a. 1), sin is nothing other than a bad human act. But, as was also said earlier (I–II q. 1 a. 1), an act is human based on the fact that it is voluntary, either voluntary in the sense of being elicited by the will (e.g. willing or choosing), or in the sense of being commanded by the will (e.g. the exterior actions of speech or deeds). But a human act is evil if it lacks its due measure, and every measure of something is attained through a comparison to some standard [regula], and if the thing deviates from that measure, it will be incommensurate. But the standard of the human will is twofold. One is proximate and homogeneous: human reason itself. The other, however, is the primary standard: the eternal law, which is as it were God’s reason. Therefore, Augustine puts two things in the definition of sin. One pertains to the substance of a human act, which is something like the ‘matter’ of sin, and this is when he says, ‘word or deed or desire’. The other pertains to the idea of evil, which is something like the ‘form’ of sin, and this is when he says, ‘contrary to the eternal law’.

In developing his justification of Augustine’s definition, Thomas rehearses a number of points already alluded to in the objections. His argument unfolds as follows:



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1. A human action is a voluntary action. 2. A voluntary action can either be entirely internal – what we might call ‘an act of will’ – or be an external action that we will to do – what we might call ‘a willed act’. 3. The goodness or badness of any act is determined by the degree to which it conforms to or deviates from some regula or standard. 4. The standard for human action is twofold: a. human reason, which is in a sense ‘closest’ and more readily apparent to us because it is our own. b. divine reason (eternal law), which is logically and ontologically primary, though less readily apparent to us. 5. The Augustinian definition therefore fittingly includes both human actions – the ‘matter’ of sin – and the eternal law as the standard by which those actions are judged – the ‘form’ of sin. While Thomas’s response is fairly clear, there are a few points that call for comment. First, in choosing to translate regula as ‘standard’ rather than ‘rule’, I have sought to convey how Thomas thinks of sin first and foremost not as transgression of a command, but as a deviation from a norm, which is set simultaneously by eternal law and human reason. The standard of action as present in human reason has a certain kind of priority, inasmuch as it is what we know first, though the standard of eternal law has primacy as the source of all order in creatures. It is important to underscore both that these two standards operate simultaneously and harmoniously and that human reason’s right functioning depends upon its proper orientation toward and participation in the eternal law, which is nothing other than divine wisdom itself. What matters here is that, in speaking of the eternal law, Augustine’s definition obliquely includes human reason. I shall say more about this below, in discussing Thomas’s reply to the fourth objection. Second, what does Thomas mean when he speaks of action as ‘matter’ and the regula as ‘form’?13 Thomas’s use of the term quasi (i.e. ‘something like’) indicates that he is using ‘matter’ and ‘form’ by way of analogy, and the analogy appears to be this: just as matter is undetermined potential that is actualized by form so as to be this or that sort of thing, so too a human action is determined as good or evil through its conformity with or deviation from the eternal 13

Note that Thomas’s use of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ here does not map seamlessly onto his use of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ in speaking of the essence of original sin.

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law. Just as a particular human being is human on account of possessing the form of humanity, so too a particular human action is a good action – a fully human action – on account of its conformity to the eternal law. To put it in terms of logic, ‘human action’ is the genus that is specified as good or evil by its conformity or non-conformity to eternal law. Because Augustine’s statement gives us both the matter of sin (human action) and its form (deviation from the eternal law) it suffices as a definition, since matter and form are analogous to genus and species. Reply to Objection 1: Affirmation and negation are traced back to a single genus. For example, in the Godhead ‘begotten’ and ‘unbegotten’ are traced back to the genus ‘relation’, as Augustine states in De Trinitate (lib. 5 cap. 6, 7). And so what is ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’, what is ‘done’ and ‘undone’, should be taken in the same way.

In his reply to the first objection, Thomas invokes a point of logic to rescue the Augustinian definition. His reasoning as stated here, however, may not exactly be clear. His point is made perhaps a bit more clearly in his Disputed Questions on Evil (q. 7 a. 1 ad 1), where he notes that two things within the same genus might be related to that genus in different ways. They might equally participate in the genus, as in the case of cows and horses in the genus ‘animal’: neither a cow nor a horse is more an animal than the other, and thus the genus is ‘univocal’. But some genera are ‘analogical’, in which case things within a genus can have a relationship of priority and posteriority to each other. The example Thomas gives is the way that the genus ‘being’ can be divided into ‘substance’ and ‘accident’: the former belonging most properly to the genus of ‘being’ and the latter belonging, as it were, due to its relationship to substance. We might also think of the way in which a human body and a urine sample might both be described as ‘healthy’: the urine sample belongs to the genus ‘healthy things’ not because it is itself a well-functioning organism, but because of its relation to a well-functioning organism, namely, a human body (see I q. 13 a. 5). A similar thing might be said of affirmation and negation. Earlier in the Summa Thomas notes, ‘negation is reduced to the genus of affirmation, as “not a human being” is reduced to the genus of substance, and “not white” to the genus of quality’ (I q. 33 a. 4 ad 3). In other words, an affirmation and a negation are understood by means of the same genus, but the negation is understood only after (logically speaking) the affirmation is understood. The key point is that Thomas seeks to defend Augustine’s definition from the objection by arguing that by supplying the affirmative actions that can be sins (words, deeds and



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desires), Augustine has implied and give one all one needs to understand the negation of those actions in sins of omission. Reply to Objection 2: The first cause of sin is in the will, which commands all voluntary acts, for only in these kinds of acts is sin to be found. This is why Augustine sometimes defines sin in terms of the will alone. But, as has been said (I–II q. 20 aa. 1–3), because external acts also pertain to the substance of sin when they themselves are evil, it was necessary in defining sin to include something pertaining to external action.

As I noted earlier, Augustine taught that it is by the will that we sin. But the medieval figure most closely associated with the teaching that sin is a matter of the will and intention is Peter Abelard (1079–1142). Abelard argued that it was the will’s consent to sin, and neither the desire to sin nor the external action, that made one a sinner. He writes: ‘the sin isn’t said to be the willing itself or the desire to do what isn’t allowed, but the consent … Adding on the performance of the deed doesn’t add anything to increase the sin.’14 As he puts it: ‘it isn’t a sin to lust after someone’s wife, or to have sex with her; sin is rather the consent to this lust or to this action.’15 For Abelard, one who intends to commit adultery is as guilty of the sin as someone who follows through on that intention, and someone who engages in an act of adultery without intending to commits no sin. While Abelard’s position on the one hand seems to simply draw out the consequences of Augustine’s emphasis on will, on the other hand it seems counter-intuitive to say that the act of adultery or theft is irrelevant to the act of sin. Abelard himself notes the oddness of saying that those who crucified Jesus, because they intended to honour God by their actions, committed no sin.16 Thomas, while agreeing with Abelard (and Augustine) that it is by the will that we sin, rejects Abelard’s sharp distinction between intention and action. Indeed, he argues that the act of the will and the external action form a single moral act (I–II q. 17 a. 4). He notes that with regard to the external aspect of the act we can discern a twofold goodness: the goodness of the action in itself and the relation of that action to its intended end. The latter goodness is due entirely to the goodness of the will, while the former is due to the action’s conformity to the standard of reason (I–II q. 20 a. 1). Thomas’s account of what makes an action good or evil appears quite complex compared to Abelard’s fairly simple 14

15 16

Ethics, in Peter Abelard, Ethical Writings, Paul Vincent Spade, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995), p. 7, nn. 29–30. Ethics n. 49, in Ethical Writings, pp. 10–11. Expositio in Epistolam ad Romanos 14:23 in Commentary on Romans, Steven R. Cartwright, trans. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), pp. 365–6.

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account. In evaluating the merit or blame attaching to an act, one must take account of not only the act itself, but also the circumstances, object, and end of the act (I–II q. 18 a. 4). For an act to be good, it must be good in every way, and if it fails to be good in any way, it is a bad act. Thus it might be praiseworthy if on a Tuesday Abraham cut wood to build a boat in order to trade with the Phoenicians; but if he did the act of wood-cutting on the Sabbath (a change of the action’s circumstance) or to fashion an idol (a change of the action’s object) then the praiseworthy intention of trading with the Phoenicians would not be sufficient to make the action a good one. To put this in the pastoral context that Thomas saw his analysis in service of, it is not sufficient for a priest hearing confessions to know what the penitent did. The confessor might have to ask not only why the penitent did the act (i.e. its end), but also the specific nature of the act (i.e. its object) and other factors concerning when and where the act occurred (i.e. its circumstances). These provide context for determining not only whether a particular act is a sin, but also the severity of the sin, and therefore the healing penance that the confessor should assign.17 As I noted in discussing the first objection, the confessor must try to see not simply single actions or intentions, but the way in which intentions are enacted in particular circumstances, bringing about particular consequences, having particular objects, and so forth (see I–II q. 73). Reply to Objection 3: The eternal law first and foremost orients a human being to his or her end, but as a consequence of this it makes one well-disposed concerning things that are means to the end. Therefore when he says, ‘contrary to the eternal law’, he includes both turning away from the end and all other forms of disorder.

The objection argued as if the only thing that mattered in defining sin was turning away from the end. In his reply, however, Thomas notes that an adequate definition of sin requires attention to both means and ends. In some cases, we may simply reject our final end, whether due to ignorance or weakness or malice. This is what Thomas identifies by the traditional term ‘mortal sin’. In other cases we retain our orientation toward the end, but in a disordered way, choosing inadequate means to attain that end. This is how Thomas understands the traditional notion, found as early as Augustine,18 of ‘venial sins’ (I–II q. 72 a. 5). Since mortal sins and venial sins are both sins in a true though analogous sense (ST I–II q. 88 a. 1), Thomas’s reply to the objection is that Augustine 17 18

See Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles lib. IV cap. 72, nn. 9, 14. See e.g. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 48.



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defines sin not as turning away from our final end, but as contradiction of the eternal law, which governs not only the end but also the means, thus making the definition applicable to venial sins and not just mortal ones. Again, we can perceive practical intent behind Thomas’s careful distinctions. He holds that while it is possible with God’s grace to avoid all mortal sin, it is not possible for us to avoid all venial sin. Though one might avoid any one particular venial sin, our nature wounded by sin is such that we cannot possibly avoid all venial sins (I–II q. 109 a. 8).19 He describes vividly how someone feeling the initial temptations of lust might seek to redirect his thoughts to abstract philosophical considerations, only to become so impressed with his own cleverness that he feels a twinge of pride (I–II q. 74 a. 3 ad 2). While one is not bound to confess venial sins, in administering the sacrament of penance the confessor must attend not only to the mortal sins of the penitent, but also the venial sins that dispose one to sin mortally, by accustoming us to love things that are not directed to our final end (I–II q. 88 a. 3). Reply to Objection 4: In saying that not every sin is evil because it is forbidden, this must be understood of a prohibition made by positive law. But if one speaks with reference to the natural law, which is contained primarily in the eternal law but secondarily in the natural judgment of human reason, then every sin is evil because it is forbidden, for it is precisely because it is disordered that it conflicts with natural law.

Though Thomas is not a ‘legalist’ in his understanding of sin, he still maintains that Augustine is correct to define sin as an act contrary to divine law. He is able to do this because he understands law as an expression of divine reason and human nature’s participation in that reason (see I–II q. 91). Thomas distinguishes several sorts of law, which are closely interrelated. As noted, ‘eternal law’ is simply divine reason itself, which is the regula or standard of all action. ‘Natural law’ is human reason’s participation in the eternal law, which is less what we might think of as a legal code and more a general sense of what is desirable, given the kinds of creatures that we are. In this sense, we might say that God is a lawgiver because he is a nature-giver: God legislates via the natural law by endowing us with our human nature. From this natural law derive specific laws that govern human conduct – what Thomas here calls ‘positive law’ and elsewhere calls ‘human law’. Thus the natural law directs human beings to provide for their offspring, while human law specifies how this is done by 19

It is not unlike the way that on any given coin toss the odds of heads coming up is 1/2, while the odds of tossing heads 100 times in a row is 1/ 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376.

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requiring, for example, that children be made to ride in car seats, that they be sent to school at a particular age and for a particular period of time, that parents provide a dowry for their daughters when it is time for them to marry, and so forth. This human law can vary according to culture and historical era, so long as it conforms to the general principles of the natural law. God also legislates via what Thomas calls ‘divine law’, by which he means the way in which God reveals laws to human beings, as in the Torah of the Old Testament or the evangelical law of the New Testament. I shall say more about this in discussing Thomas’s reply to the fifth objection. So there is a sense in which, for Thomas, sin always involves a violation of law, inasmuch as it is a violation of the created order that is an expression of divine wisdom. When Thomas says that it is not always a sin to break a law, he is thinking of the human or positive law that gives specificity to natural law. In a case where the law requires that a child be made to ride in a car seat or provided with a dowry, it is no sin to violate this law, so long as the natural law’s requirement that parents care for their offspring is not violated. If a human law violates the natural law, say by denying human dignity based on race or enshrining a tyrannical rule, then not only is it not sin to break that law, it would be a sin to obey it. So Thomas’s non-legalistic approach to sin turns out to be rooted in a more profound sense of law as an expression of divine wisdom. Reply to Objection 5: Theologians consider sin chiefly in terms of it being an offence against God; moral philosophers consider it in terms of it being contrary to reason. Therefore Augustine more fittingly defines sin in terms of its being ‘contrary to the eternal law’ than in terms of its being contrary to reason, especially since we are ruled and guided by the eternal law in many things that exceed human reason, as in the case of those things that are matters of faith.

In his reply to the final objection, Thomas reminds us of the difference between the philosophical and theological perspectives. Because Thomas so often operates at a very high level of abstraction, and so frequently appeals to Aristotle in analysing virtue and vice, one can easily forget that he sees himself as a Christian theologian who is attempting to help preachers and confessors do their jobs more effectively. Indeed, in discussing Thomas’s understanding of sin I have had little occasion to mention the drama of the Genesis narrative of the Fall,20 or Paul’s reflections on sin and righteousness, or Jesus’ prodigal bestowal of divine mercy on those who have so prodigally squandered their 20

In the Summa theologiae, Thomas’s discussion of the Fall occurs not as a part of his general discussion of sin, but as part of his discussion of the virtue of Temperance (II–II qq. 163–5).



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divine inheritance. In this final reply, however, Thomas reminds us that what the Christian theologian can and must say about sin far surpasses what the moral philosopher (a term Thomas only ever applies to non-Christian thinkers) can say, precisely to the extent that the truth that faith can know surpasses the truth that unaided human reason can grasp. On the one hand, Thomas thinks that human beings can know through reason the moral truths that they need in order to live well in this life, just as they can know through reason certain truths concerning God. On the other hand, just as the truths know about God through reason can only be ‘known by a few, and after a long time, and with many errors mixed in’ (I q. 1 a. 1), so too with our knowing and doing of the good. Moreover, even if we know and do the good to the fullest extent of our natural powers, this would suffice only for attaining the imperfect and fragile happiness of this life; it could in no way enable us to attain the perfect eternal happiness to which human beings are called by God (I–II q. 4 aa. 5–8). To attain this happiness, human beings must be guided by the eternal law, which is given to us not only through the divine law of the Torah and the Gospel, but above all through the grace of the Holy Spirit, which becomes a standard or rule that is written in our hearts, an internal principle of action freely bestowed on us in Christ (I–II q. 106 a. 1). Seen in the light of grace, sin too takes on new contours. More than simply the product of vicious habits that thwart our flourishing, sin appears as a rejection of the gift of divine love. In a sermon from a series on the Ten Commandment preached to a popular audience, Thomas captures well the difference between the philosopher’s account of vice and what the theologian means by sin. There, rather than defining the rightness or wrongness of human actions in terms of their conformity to reason (whether divine or human), Thomas says, ‘any human work is right and virtuous when it is in accordance with the standard of divine love; when it is not in accordance with the rule of charity it is not good, right or perfect’.21 Sin is a deviation from the rule of divine love, which we share in through grace that forms the created disposition of charity within us. The fact that we arrive at divine love only at the end of this account of what Thomas has to say about sin should not obscure the primacy that Thomas assigns to charity. Indeed, the primacy of charity has been presumed throughout this account. Only a free action is subject to moral evaluation because it is through grace’s movement of the will to love that the soul is joined to God. Original sin is formally the loss of original justice and materially concupiscence because 21

Collationes in decem preceptis II.

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loving any creature more than God is a derangement of our very being. Venial sins are distinguished from mortal sins because the latter destroy the bond of charity between the sinner and God while the former do not. And the passion of Christ is the undoing of sin because it is the supreme act of love, which Christ effects on our behalf (III q. 47 a. 2 ad 1, q. 48 aa. 2–3). For Thomas, the Christian language of divine love and the loss of that love through sin speaks far more eloquently of the human condition than the Aristotelian language of virtue and vice – as useful as that Aristotelian language is – because the end for which we have been created is the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ to be love. Thomas wrote the Summa so that Dominican friars and others could more effectively proclaim the truth of this God and offer his mercy to penitent sinners.

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Martin Luther Robert Kolb

Martin Luther and his Wittenberg colleagues spoke of the whole of biblical teaching (doctrina) as a body, the individual parts (topics, articles) of which fit together as an intricate organism.1 Their understanding of sin, sins and sinfulness occupied a key position in this corpus doctrinae (body of doctrine) or rule of faith. The utter seriousness with which they treated sin’s corruption of God’s human creature arose out of their doctrine of creation and God’s lordship over the creatures he had fashioned. This notion of sin formed the framework of their conception of justification by faith in Christ – Luther noted that ‘the more you minimize sin, the more grace declines in value’ – and of their definition of the entire Christian life as a life of daily repentance.2 Sin invaded God’s creation, according to the Wittenberg theologians, when Adam and Eve doubted the Word of their Creator and thus defied him, denying his lordship. This doubt destroyed the framework of their thinking and living and elicited repeated acts of disobedience which violated his plan for human conduct. Sin earned its wage, bringing death to the sinner (Rom 6.23). God’s gift of new life through Christ’s death ‘for our trespasses’ and resurrection ‘for our justification’ (Rom 4.25) formed the basis for Luther’s lifelong struggle with the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the elect, baptized, faithful people of God. He transformed the medieval sacrament of penance into the general practice of daily repentance, turning from sin to Christ, in the 1

2

Irene Dingel, ‘Melanchthon and the Establishment of Confessional Norms’, in Irene Dingel, Robert Kolb, Nicole Kuropka and Timothy J. Wengert, Philip Melanchthon. Theologian in Classroom, Confession, and Controversy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), pp. 162–5; originally ‘Melanchthon und die Normierung des Bekenntnisses’, in Der Theologe Melanchthon, Günter Frank (ed.) (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2000), pp. 195–211. Martin Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, in vol. 42 of D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Böhlau, 1911), pp. 107, henceforth WA; Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, in George V. Schick (trans.), Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), Luther’s Works 1 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1958), p. 142, henceforth LW.

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tension between God’s demand for faithfulness in his law and his restoration of the identity of God’s child in his chosen faithful through the gospel.3

The Original Sin Luther and his collaborators in Wittenberg hoped to win the Western church for their theology. That explains in part why they retained terminology familiar in medieval theology. However, not seldom that terminology underwent a transition – a deepening or broadening as well as sometimes a reversal in meaning – in their mouths and hands. This was the case with the concept of ‘original sin’. They translated the Latin peccatum originis as ‘inherited sin’, never abandoning an emphasis that every human being born since Eden is conceived and born sinful, an inheritance from Adam and Eve. As much an analysis of the common human state as an accusation and condemnation, the concept of original sin, which permeates human thinking and living, formed the basis of Wittenberg treatments of death and the after-life as well as the sins committed in the course of everyday life.4 Regarding Psalm 51.5, ‘in sin did my mother conceive me’, Luther paraphrased David: ‘before you [God], I am such a sinner that my nature, my very origin, my conception, is sin, to say nothing of the words, works, thoughts, and life which follow … I am an evil tree and by nature a child of wrath and sin.’ Luther confessed that this ‘old Adam must die and decay before Christ can arise completely. This begins with a penitent life and is completed through death.’5 This conception of sin shaped Luther’s definition of various biblical terms regarding what has gone wrong with God’s human creatures. L’ubomír Batka has provided an excellent overview of this terminology. Luther translated the Hebrew pescha as ‘sin’, ‘unrighteousness’ or ‘transgression’. Aon referred specifically to ‘unrighteousness in God’s sight’ but later also to ‘misdeeds’. The Hebrew hattaa he rendered as ‘original sin’, the fundamental inclination against God.

3

4

5

Oswald Bayer, Promissio, Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971). See Robert Kolb, ‘The Lutheran Doctrine of Original Sin’, in Hans Madueme and Michael Reeves (eds), Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin: Theological, Biblical, and Scientific Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), pp. 107–25. Martin Luther, Die sieben Bußpsalmen, zweite Bearbeitung, heraußgegeben von D. Brenner und D. Reichert, in vol. 18 of WA (Weimar: Böhlau, 1908), pp. 501–2; Martin Luther, The Seven Penitential Psalms, in Selected Psalms III, Arnold Guebert (trans.), Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), LW 14 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), p. 169.



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Rascha indicated for him ‘rude Godlessness, pride and a lack of fear of God, an active self-confidence of one’s own righteousness and denial of sin’ – evil.6 By 1515, Luther had come to identify concupiscence with original sin, departing from his scholastic instructors’ belief that baptism removes original sin and that concupiscence is only the tinder from which sin arises.7 Luther slowly came to put the medieval term peccatum originis to use by redefining this basis of sinfulness within the framework of his presupposition that God had established his relationship with his human creatures through speaking to them. God’s Word had created the universe (Gen. 1), and trust in God’s Word constituted the core of being human. Luther defined humanity by means of the first commandment as the command to fear, love, and trust in God above all else.8 Doubt, or false trust, constitutes the original sin of the first parents and of human creatures in every age. Lecturing to his students on Genesis 3 in 1535, he said: ‘Satan here attacks Adam and Eve in this way to deprive them of the Word and to make them believe his lie after they have lost the Word and their trust in God … Unbelief is the source of all sins; when Satan brought about this unbelief by driving out or corrupting the Word, the rest was easy for him … The chief temptation was to listen to another word and depart from the word that God had already spoken.’9 Without God’s Word Adam and Eve turned in the void of their doubt to Satan’s lie. ‘When Satan had separated them from and deprived them of God’s Word, nothing was not easy for him.’10 ‘After he had taken away the Word, he corrupted the perfect will which the human creature had previously had and turned him into a rebel. He corrupted the intellect also so that it doubted God’s will. The eventual result is a rebellious hand extended against God’s will, the hand that picked the fruit. Next the mouth and teeth became rebellious.’ Doubt is all-embracing. Luther concluded: ‘All evils result from unbelief or doubt of the Word and of God.’11 This doubt or defiance of God and his Word expressed itself, Luther believed, in 6

7

8

9 10 11

L’ubomír Batka, ‘Luther’s Teaching on Sin and Evil’, in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel and L’ubomír Batka (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 234–43; cf. pp. 233–53. L’ubomír Batka, Peccatum radicale. Eine Studie zu Luthers Erbsündenverständnis in Psalm 51 (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 2007), pp. 37–75. Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, ed. Irene Dingel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), p. 862/863, henceforth BSELK; The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), p. 351, henceforth BC; cf. Batka, Peccatum radicale, pp. 224–9. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 42.110–11; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 1.147. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 42.111; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 1.147. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 42.111; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 1.147–8.

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wanting to be God himself … Adam first committed such a sin in Paradise, for he let that ancient serpent, the devil, incite him. He was not satisfied with being a beautiful creature of God, created in God’s image. He wanted also to be God and to know good and evil … In the same way, we, too, all follow after our first father, Adam. For we suppose that our wisdom, money and property will accomplish everything, and we put our confidence in them and do not trust in God’s goodness and mercy. In sum, this is the first sin, which Adam first committed and which now runs down without interruption through us … this sin is the greatest and gravest of sins, from which all other sins originate.12

Commenting on Psalm 51.5, Luther asserted that David was not talking about his mother’s sinful actions, about procreation and sexuality, but simply stating the truth that all human beings since Adam and Eve have been conceived and born seeking always to fashion false gods as substitutes for him.13 Because Luther believed that someone or something must command ultimate human trust, since trusting constitutes the very core of being human, removal of trust from the Creator compels human beings to create their own gods.14 The devil obliges in this fashioning of idols without sinners even noticing, lending his aid to the process since ‘when God’s Word is altered or corrupted’, then ‘come new and freshly-invented gods whom our fathers did not worship [Deut. 32.17].’15 Thus, at the heart of forsaking God lies a show of pious concern to make life right. But misplaced trust in any substitute for the Creator perverts and poisons human existence itself. Though all people have some sense of sin – in others if not in themselves – original sin must be revealed by the Holy Spirit since only those who recognize the true God can fully grasp what doubt and rejection of his Word truly means. In the agenda he prepared in 1536/37 for the Lutheran princes to use at the papally called council (which eventually met in 1545 in Trent), Luther noted that ‘this inherited sin has caused such a deep, evil corruption of nature that reason does not comprehend it; rather it must be believed on the basis of the revelation in the Scriptures’, citing Psalm 51.5, Romans 5.12, Exodus 33.20 and Genesis 3.1-13 as passages which testify to the reality of this corruption.16 In 1532 he had commented on Psalm 51 that original sin ‘is hidden from the whole 12

13

14 15 16

Martin Luther, Wochenpredigten über Job 16–20, in vol. 28 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1903), pp. 349; LW 69:230–1. Martin Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, in vol. 40, 2 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1914), pp. 380; Martin Luther, Psalm 51, in Selected Psalms I, Jaroslav Pelikan (trans., ed.), LW 12 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955), p. 348. BSELK, pp. 930/931–932/933; BC, pp. 386–7. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 42.112; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 1.148. BSELK, p. 746/747; BC, p. 311.



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world and not revealed by our powers, reasonings, or speculations but is rather obscured, defended and excused by them. We need God’s Word from heaven to reveal this uncleanness or fault of our nature.’17 The reformer’s lectures on Psalm 90 delivered in 1534 state that ‘the entire human race fell so far away from God and is so thoroughly blinded by original sin that human beings know neither themselves nor God. Indeed, they do not even know what a miserable state they are in though they sense it and languish under it. They neither understand its origin, nor do they perceive its final outcome. Thus, the misery which our first parents brought upon themselves as a result of their sin and transmitted to their posterity is indescribably great.’18 This echoed the conclusion of Luther’s Large Catechism on the first commandment: trust in anyone or anything other than God himself is the root of all sin.19

The Devil, the World and the Flesh Intimately connected to Luther’s view of sin was his view of its sources, especially Satan, the deceiver and murderer (Luther frequently cited Jn 8.44).20 Christians constantly experience the eschatological struggle between God’s truth, expressed both in his promises and in his plan for daily life, and Satan’s deception, which offers false promises and perverts the will into centring life on the self or some other created objects. But this does not abrogate human responsibility for succumbing to the desires that endeavour to turn even God’s faithful people to sin. Explaining the sixth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, he described the sources of temptation. Sinful desire from within, ‘the Old Adam … goes to work and daily lures us into unchastity, laziness, gluttony, and drunkenness, greed and deceit, into acts of fraud and deception against our neighbor’ and all other kinds of sin. The ‘world’ assaults believers by tempting them ‘to anger and impatience … hatred and envy, enmity, violence and injustice, perfidy, vengeance, cursing, reviling, slander, arrogance and pride, along with fondness for luxury, honor, fame, and power’. The devil attacks, ‘baits and badgers us on all sides, but especially exerts himself where the conscience and spiritual matters are 17 18

19 20

Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, WA 40, 2.385; Luther, Psalm 51, LW 12.351. Martin Luther, Enarratio Psalmi XC, in vol. 40, 3 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1930), p. 485; Martin Luther, Psalm 90, in Selected Psalms II, Paul M. Bretscher (trans.), Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), LW 13 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), p. 76. Cf. Dennis Ngien, Fruit for the Soul: Luther on the Lament Psalms (forthcoming). BSELK, pp. 930/931–932/933; BC, pp. 386–7. Cf. Hans-Martin Barth, Der Teufel und Jesus Christus in der Theologie Martin Luthers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967).

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concerned … to make us scorn and despise both the Word and the works of God, to tear us away from faith, hope, and love, to draw us into unbelief, false security, and stubbornness, or, on the contrary, to drive us into despair, denial of God, blasphemy, and countless other abominable sins.’ These are his ‘fiery darts’ (Eph. 6.16). Believers must combat these tempters by praying for strength to resist.21 Praying ‘your will be done’ counters the devil’s opposition to and obstruction of God’s will, since this ‘furious foe raves and rages with all his power and might, marshaling all his subjects and even enlisting the world and our own flesh as his allies … Here the devil stirs things up, feeding and fanning the flames, in order to block our way, put us to flight, cut us down, and bring us once again under his power.’22 Praying for daily bread also is directed against Satan, for his whole purpose and desire is to take away or interfere with all we have received from God. He is not satisfied to obstruct and overthrow the spiritual order … but also prevents and impedes the establishment of any kind of government or honorable and peaceful relations on earth. This is why he causes so much contention, murder, sedition, and war, why he sends storms and hail to destroy crops and cattle, why he poisons the air, etc. In short, it pains him that anyone should receive even a mouthful of bread from God and eat it in peace.23

As strong as Satan is and as seriously as Luther took his assaults, in the end the reformer did not transfer responsibility for sinning from the human being to the devil, even though passages which warn of the believer’s impotence over against Satan and the need for the Holy Spirit’s aid in fighting him may seem to lift that responsibility. He could encourage believers by attributing their disobedience to the devil,24 but he always returned to human guilt before the God to whom they sometimes would not listen. Temptations come from both one’s own sinful desires and from Satan; in both cases Luther counsels resistance through prayer, relying on the power of the Holy Spirit.25

God’s Wrath and the Sinner’s Death The sinner’s perversion of true fear and love for God provokes God’s wrath, and God’s wrath causes death, two topics inextricably linked in Luther’s proclamation 21 22 23 24 25

BSELK, pp. 1102/1103–1106/1107; BC, pp. 454–5. BSELK, pp. 1090/1091; BC, p. 448. BSELK, pp. 1096/1097–1098/1099; BC, p. 451. Luther, Enarratio Psalmi XC, WA 40, 3.546; Luther, Psalm 90, LW 13.113. Luther, Enarratio Psalmi XC, WA 40, 3.540–541; Luther, Psalm 90, LW 13.109.



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or his understanding of original sin.26 Because Luther saw Moses as the voice of God’s law, which is not only his good plan for proper and fulfilling human life27, but also, as such, the standard upon which human actions and attitudes are evaluated, he could call Moses the voice of God’s wrath against sinners. Psalm 90, the only psalm attributed to Moses, gave the professor firm basis for developing this conclusion. In view of God’s creation of his human creatures to be in his image and live forever hearkening to his Word, Luther labelled death ‘a disaster’,’ ‘threatened by God and caused by an incensed and estranged God’.28 Death is ultimately God’s visitation in Luther’s view because the devil does not create or control death; God remains in control and turns his wrath to mercy in Jesus Christ.29 Therefore, believers wrestling with their own sinful desires experience this struggle with the wrath of God, knowing ‘that their death, together all other miseries of this life, is to be equated with God’s wrath. Hence they find themselves warring and battling with an infuriated God in an effort to protect their salvation.’30 Luther certainly focused attention on the sinner’s guilt, but he highlighted even more the terror of God’s wrath that haunts sinners.

Actual Sins Doubting God and his Word disrupts not only sinners’ relationship with God but also with other human creatures and even themselves. Original sin ‘curved people in upon themselves’ [incurvatus/incurvatio in se ipsum] because their failure to have confidence in God turned their attention to protecting themselves, and this always happens at the expense of others. Actual sins are the inevitable result of original sin.31 The failure to fear, love and trust in God above all things causes disobedience to all other commands of God, Luther taught the 26 27

28 29

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Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, WA 40, 2.383–384; Luther, Psalm 51, LW 12.350. Martin Luther, In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas Commentarius ex praelectione D. Martini Lutheri collectus, in vol. 40, 1 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1911), pp. 519–21; Martin Luther, Predigt am Tage der Beschneidung, in vol. 36 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1909), pp. 13–14. Luther, Enarratio Psalmi XC, WA 40, 3:513; Luther, Psalm 90, LW 13:94. Luther, Enarratio Psalmi XC, WA 40, 3:518–522; Luther, Psalm 90, LW 13:96–99. The view of Richard Marius, Martin Luther. The Christian between God and Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), that Luther’s fear of death shaped his theology, is simply false; Luther continuously expressed strong confidence in God’s gift of resurrection; see Robert Kolb, ‘“Ein kindt des todts” und “Gottes Gast”. Das Sterben in Luthers Predigten’, Lutherische Theologie und Kirche 31 (2007): pp. 3–22; idem, ‘‘Life is King and Lord over Death’: Martin Luther’s View of Death and Dying’, in Tod und Jenseits in der Schriftkultur der Frühen Neuzeit, Marion Kobelt Groch and Cornelia Niekus Moore (eds) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), pp. 23–45. Luther, Enarratio Psalmi XC, WA 40, 3:544–545; Luther, Psalm 90, LW 13.112. Batka, Peccatum radicale, pp. 132–43.

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children learning the first commandment from his catechism. His explanation to all other commandments began ‘we should fear and love God’, and went on to summarize what human beings should not do and what they should do.32 He anchored his appraisal of sinfulness in Paul’s dictum: ‘All that is not done in faith is sin’ (Rom. 14. 23).33 Thus, ‘good works do not make a good person but a good person does good works; evil works do not make a wicked person, but a wicked person does evil works.’34 Luther’s anthropology was grounded in his distinction of two modes of relationship – two kinds of (or two-fold) righteousness, he labelled it – a passive and receptive relationship of trust in God, an active relationship of love and service to both God and others.35 This understanding of what it means to be human meant that all activity by the faithful, either in the vertical realm of their lives or the horizontal, counted only as a fruit of salvation and faith, not as a cause or basis for winning God’s favour. Luther’s exposition of God’s law aimed at labeling sinful actions as sinful and driving home God’s accusation against those who committed them in order to bring them to repentance as well as instruction for proper human activity. David provided an excellent example of the interconnectedness of sins and their root in rejecting God and doubting his Word. In his lectures on Psalm 51 (1532) Luther pointed out that the repentant king in this psalm acknowledged not only his ‘external sins but also of his entire sinful nature, the source and origin’ of those sins. Original sin and actual sin are inextricably linked. ‘The entire psalm speaks of his entire sinfulness or the root of his sin, not only about 32 33

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BSELK, pp. 862/863–868/869; BC, pp. 352–4. E.g. cf. his lectures on Hebrews, 1518/1519, Martin Luther, Die Vorlesung über den Hebräerbrief, in vol. 57, 3 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1939), p. 234; Martin Luther, Lectures on Hebrews, in Lectures on Titus, Philemon, and Hebrews, Walter A. Hansen (trans.), Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), LW 29 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1968), pp. 236–7; his Sermon on Epiphany, Martin Luther, Evangelium am Tage der heiligen drei Könige, Matth. 2, 1–12, in vol. 10, 1 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1910), pp. 687, 680; Martin Luther, Epiphany, Matt. 2:1–12, in Church Postil II, Benjamin T. G. Mayes and James L. Langebartels (trans., eds), LW 76 (St. Louis: Concordia, 2013), pp. 165, 167; his lectures on Ga. 2.16 (1531), Martin Luther, In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas Commentarius ex praelectione D. Martini Lutheri collectus, WA 40, 1:223; Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians, in Jaroslav Pelikan (trans., ed.), LW 26 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), p. 126; and Gal. 4.6, Luther, In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas Commentarius ex praelectione D. Martini Lutheri collectus, WA 40, 1:575–576; Luther, Lectures on Galatians, LW 26:378; on Genesis, Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 42:196; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 1:265; and his disputation on Hebrews 13:8, Martin Luther, Die Promotionsdisputation von Heinrich Schmedenstede, in vol. 39, 2 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1932), p. 198; Martin Luther, The Licentiate Examination of Heinrich Schmedenstede, in Career of the Reformer IV, Lewis W. Spitz (trans., ed.), LW 34 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1960), p. 315. Freedom of a Christian, 1520, Martin Luther, Epistola Lutheriana ad Leonem Decimum summum pontificem. Tractatus de libertate christiana., in vol. 7 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1897), p. 62; Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, in Career of the Reformer I, W. A. Lambert (trans.), Harold J. Grimm (ed.), LW 31 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1957), p. 361. Robert Kolb, ‘Luther on the Two Kinds of Righteousness; Reflections on His Two-Dimensional Definition of Humanity at the Heart of His Theology’, Lutheran Quarterly 13 (1999): 449­–66.



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what he did, but also the fruit born of the tree of sin and its root.’ David not only stood guilty of adultery with Bathsheba and Uriah’s murder but also of wanting to appear in public as a holy man who lived the law and exercised justice while at the same time he had arranged for the killing of Uriah, ‘a good man without doubt, of outstanding trustworthiness in David’s kingdom’. In breaking the fifth and sixth commandments, David had defied and despised the Lord, and thus he had become guilty of blasphemy, against the first commandment.36 David recognized both his guilt in the case of Uriah and Bathsheba and, ‘in the mirror’ of these sins, ‘the impurity of his entire nature’. Luther commented: [G]reat is the wisdom that recognizes that we are nothing else but sin … According to this psalm you must define sin in its totality, which is present when we are born from father and mother, before we reach the age where we are able to say, do, or think something. Out of this root nothing good in God’s sight can arise from within us. This is the origin of the distinction of two kinds of sin. First of all, the whole nature is corrupt through sin and subject to eternal death. Then other kinds of sin arise, which those who know the law can recognize, such as, for example, stealing, adultery, murder, etc.37

God’s law conveys his plan for human living, according to Luther. For sinners the restoration of their relationship with God begins with the recognition of the separation from God which the law reveals in many and varied ways as its pressures open up cracks in sinners’ false confidence in other gods. The Creator structured human life for mutual service in the situations outlined by medieval social theory, the oeconomia (in which Luther distinguished family life and economic activities), the politia or society, especially civil government, and the ecclesia, the church or religious life. In addition, God gave explicit commands that required human beings to perform certain actions and/or avoid others. Luther’s Small Catechism instructs penitent Christians to confess their sins on the basis of evaluating their actions within the structures and responsibilities to which God has called them for service to him and their neighbours.38 In his Smalcald Articles, Luther taught that God’s law works in two ways, with a variety of impacts. It keeps order in society by threatening punishments for disobedience and promising reward for obedience. These dicta, however, not only work good by keeping public order. They also can provoke rebellious 36

37 38

The Wittenberg reformer continued to use the traditional Western medieval numbering of the Ten Commandments, including the prohibition of graven images in the first commandment and dividing the prohibition of coveting. Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, WA 40, 2.321–322, 27. BSELK, pp. 884/885; BC, p. 360.

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sinners to worse sins, committed in determined defiance of God and his law, and they can be falsely used in a vain attempt to make oneself look good in God’s sight rather than relying on his unconditional favour, a grievous transgression of the first commandment. More importantly, the law reveals inherited sin and its fruits, finally terrifying and humbling sinners, preparing them for repentance.39 Although Luther did not adopt the terminology of his colleague, Philip Melanchthon, labelling a third use of the law, from early in his career he practised the use of the law to offer instruction positively through exposition of God’s will and negatively through threats against its transgression for daily Christian life.40 Luther’s rejection of ecclesiastical regulations, particularly prescriptions of sacred activities designed by church officials to appease and please God, led him to focus on the ten commandments and other biblical commands as the only reliable standard of evaluation of which human actions are God-pleasing and which are not. By grounding his definition of actual sins in the Ten Commandments, Luther wiped from consideration a host of offences against ecclesiastical law that dominated much of the medieval perception of, and confession of, sins.41 Although he asserted that the Decalogue is simply the version of the natural law written on all human hearts, in fact that natural law as he understood it coincided with biblical moral teaching. In practice, for Luther Scripture alone established his definition of God-pleasing obedience to the standard which God had set for humanity. Not all laws given to Israel remained valid for the church, but God’s essential plan for living is expressed in the Ten Commandments. Whatever broke that plan offended God’s will. Luther’s explanations of the Ten Commandments in his Large Catechism provide a helpful overview of his definition of the sins that break God’s expression of his will in them. His examples offered concrete embodiments of such misdeeds. All sins are equal in God’s sight since they all reveal the fundamental rejection of God’s Word, will and person; actual sins are symptoms of that rejection. Nonetheless, Luther also acknowledged some sinful acts have more far-reaching impact on victims and even on the perpetrator. The Wittenberg reformer’s treatment of the second commandment, regarding holding God’s name sacred and using his Word properly and regularly provides

39 40

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BSELK, pp. 746/747–748/749; BC, pp. 311–12. Timothy J. Wengert, Law and Gospel, Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), pp. 177–210. For details of medieval penitential doctrine and practice, see Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).



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an example: it equated all good works – those rendered directly to God in praise and prayer or those performed indirectly for him through love and service to other human creatures and in the care of all creation. However, Luther recognized the special impact of obeying God’s command to use his name properly and to be engaged with his Word regularly. The use of God’s name in the commission of perjury in court, or in deception in the market place or in contracting marriage, exempliflies flagrant misuse of his name; dishonesty is sinful in itself, but covering with an oath in God’s name compounds its seriousness. Oaths performed honestly to support public order do not offend God, but their use to cover and gloss over disgrace or to attain other wicked goals brings judgement upon the land. The worst abuse of his name is preaching false doctrine and deceptive nonsense as God’s Word. Luther’s treatment of the positive aspects of praying to God and praising him implied sins of omission, but Luther did not address them directly.42 God’s law prescribed proper human behaviour in the horizontal as well as vertical realms of life. God’s command to love as he has first loved his human creatures is fundamental to the shape and practice of humanness and underlay all human endeavour in horizontal relationships, the Wittenberg reformer taught. Perhaps that is nowhere clearer than in his interpretation of ‘not bearing false witness against the neighbour’. This eighth commandment requires telling the truth rather lying, but the law of love demands that when it is not necessary to speak the truth publicly as it is, for instance, for those administering justice in the courtroom, one should keep public silence. Admonition of others when they do wrong is necessary, Luther affirmed, but believers should not bring information about the wrongdoing of others into the public arena unless called by their societal obligations to do so.43 Life in sixteenth-century Germany confronted significant challenges to personal security and societal order, so it is not surprising that the command to honour parents – and by extension employers, government officials and pastors – took on special significance for Luther. Forgetting parents, not caring for them, being ashamed of them, and abandoning them in their old age earned Luther’s condemnation, as did the failure of servants within the household to perform their duties. Likewise, obedience is due to the governmental authorities who provide protection and public order for subjects and citizens.

BSELK, pp. 948/49–956/57; BC, pp. 393–5. BSELK, pp. 1022/23–1028/29; BC, pp. 421–4.

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At the same time Luther also condemned ‘scoundrels or tyrants’ who falsely exercised their responsibilities as parents, employers, or rulers. The parental office is not a matter of your pleasure and whim. It is a strict commandment and injunction of God, who holds you accountable for it … The real trouble is that no one perceives or pays attention to this. Everyone acts as if God gave us children for our pleasure and amusement, gave us servants merely to put them to work like cows or donkeys, and gave us subjects to treat as we please as if it were no concern of ours what they learn [in the schools princes and municipal councils were supposed to provide] or how they live. No one is willing to see that this is the command of the divine Majesty, who will solemnly call us to account and punish us for its neglect.44

Luther freely criticized the sins of princes and patricians as well as those of the peasants. In lecturing on Genesis he discussed specific sins of contemporary rulers who, in contrast to Joseph’s godly governance of Egypt, oppressed their subjects, practising tyranny and negligence in office. He condemned them for their ambition and arrogance,45 their ignoring God’s Word and open crime,46 their failure to support the church and its pastors,47 and their unreasonable taxation of the people.48 Worse than the princes were their counsellors, who sought their own benefit rather than the benefit of their princes’ subjects; like wolves, foxes, vultures and other birds of prey, they strove for their own advantage.49 Love for those for whom God had given them responsibility had vanished. The command not to kill embraced harm ‘by hand, heart, or word, by signs or gestures, by aiding and abetting’. Luther’s explanation illustrates the way in which he thought of sin in the light of the general obligation to love one’s neighbour as oneself: The commandment is violated not only when we do evil but also when we have the opportunity to do good to our neighbors and to prevent, protect, and save them from suffering bodily harm or injury, but fail to do so. If you send a naked person away when you could clothe him, you have let him freeze to death. If 44 45

46 47 48 49

BSELK, pp. 970/971–992/993; BC, pp. 401–10. Martin Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung (Fortsezung und Schluß), in vol. 44 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1915), pp. 436, 665; Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 45–50, in Paul D. Pahl (trans.), Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), LW 8 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1966), pp. 117–18; Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 38–44, in Paul D. Pahl (trans.), Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), LW 7(St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), p. 184. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 44.667; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 8.121. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 44.670–671; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 8.125–126. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 44.417–418; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 7.160. Luther, Text der Genesisvorlesung, WA 44.416; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, LW 7.158.



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you see anyone who is suffering from hunger and do not feed him, you have let him starve. Likewise, if you see anyone who is condemned to death or in similar peril and do not save him although you have means and ways to do so, you have killed him … You have withheld your love from them and robbed them of the kindness by means of which their lives might have been saved.50

Failing to love in such situations violates God’s plan for human living as much as active hatred. ‘Stealing’, Luther avowed, involved ‘not just robbing someone’s strongbox or pocketbook but also taking advantage of someone in the market, in all stores, butcher shops, wine and beer cellars, workshops, and in short, wherever business is transacted and money is exchanged for goods or services.’ The negligence, laziness, carelessness, and malice of servants and the highhanded overcharging of people, often for unreliable and shoddy workmanship, practised by artisans, workers and day labourers caused more harm than sneak thieves, Luther observed. He found fraud, even among friends, and swindling in the marketplace, with ‘defective merchandise, false weights and measures, and counterfeit coins’, all too common. ‘Thievery is the most common craft and the largest guild on earth.’ Merchants and artisans had turned the public market ‘into nothing but a carrion pit and robber’s den. The poor are defrauded every day, in their own arbitrary, defiant, arrogant way, as if it were their privilege and right to set [the price of] their goods as high as they please without any criticism. We stand by and let such people fleece, grab, and hound.’ Nor did Luther spare bankers, ‘the great, powerful archthieves with whom lords and princes consort and who daily plunder not just a city or two but all Germany’.51 Throughout his career Luther harshly reprimanded greed, as wicked exploitation of the neighbour and idolatrous worship of Mammon.52 Luther combated actual sins with sharp, concrete critiques of the wrongdoing he observed in himself, in Wittenberg’s lecture halls and marketplace, in the news from the wider world as it came to him. He took godly behaviour with extreme seriousness, for he believed that the trust in God that defines human beings produces its fruits in the good works of new obedience to God. Nonetheless, the warfare against sin in each believer’s life continued because of the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil even in the lives of the faithful. Thus, an important component of Luther’s view of sin was the daily repentance 50 51 52

BSELK, pp. 994/995–996/997; BC, pp. 411–12. BSELK, pp. 1006/1007–1018/1019; BC, pp. 416–20. Ricardo Rieth, ‘Habsucht bei Martin Luther: ökonomisches und theologisches Denken, Tradition und soziale Wirklichkeit im Zeitalter der Reformation (Weimar: Böhlau, 1996).

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that kills again the ‘old Adam’ and renews life in the footsteps of Christ. Much of his preaching and writing addressed this battle between the law of sin and the law of God within the believer (Rom. 7.21-23).

Simul justus et peccator Early in life Luther had felt the seriousness and crushing weight of his own alienation from God. He never lost his consciousness of his own struggle with that which he did not want to do and be. With the medieval system of penance embedded in his consciousness to an unusually deep degree, Luther longed for reconciliation with God. In recasting the elements of penance into sincere repentance under the law’s accusation and the gospel’s pronouncement and assurance of forgiveness and new life in Christ, he found liberation from guilt and terror before God’s wrath. This liberation provided the impetus to combat sin in joyful new obedience in the fruits of faith. But he also recognized that believers struggle against sin their entire lives in spite of their trust in Christ and their desire to do only the will of God. Thus, early in his career he departed from the scholastic opinion that baptism eliminated original sin. Through baptism, Luther believed, original sin is forgiven and God does not identify his chosen and baptized people with it, but sinners continue to experience the doubt and denial of God and his Word that is original sin. He turned often to Paul’s struggle in Romans 7.7-25 and the apostle’s serious reckoning with the battle of sinful desire with faith in Christ (flesh versus spirit) in Galatians 5. His 1521 defence of his position on several topics that Roman officialdom had attacked included his affirmation of this teaching and a rejection of the doctrine that ‘what remains after baptism is not sin … [but] penalty and not guilt … a defect or weakness rather than sin’.53 Thus, Luther argued, ‘a godly Christian ought to learn and know that all his good works are inadequate and insufficient in God’s sight … despair of his own works and rely solely on God’s mercy, putting all confidence and trust in him.’54 Commenting on 1 John 1.8, he observed: ‘although we have become a new creature, nevertheless, the remnants of sin always remain in us. We still have sin, and the poison is still in us, and that

53

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Martin Luther, Stephan Roths Festpostille, in vol. 17, 2 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1927), pp. 339,14–18 (329,8–344,28); Martin Luther, Defense and Explanation of all the Articles, in Career of the Reformer II, Charles M. Jacobs (trans.), George W. Forell (ed.), LW 32 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), p. 25. Luther, Stephan Roths Festpostille, WA 17, 2:432–433; Luther, Defense and Explanation of All the Articles, LW 32:83.



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incites us to the fruits of sin’, with David (2 Sam. 11.15) and Peter (Gal. 2.11-14) as examples. But he counted on God’s faithfulness and the blood of Christ to bring forgiveness for repentant believers.55 Luther held out the possibility of losing new birth in Christ through committing sin, but so long as it does not establish its rule in the one tempted, Luther proclaimed God’s faithfulness.56 Often his dealing with daily struggles implicitly attempts to apply God’s Word with the contradictions inherent in the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the faithful through the proper distinction of law and gospel. Faith may be lost, but God is faithful to his promise. The former must be said to those who are resisting God, and the latter to those who are broken and grieving over their sinfulness. Reconciling the two messages is as impossible as explaining the mystery of the continued presence of both one’s own sin and the evil visited by others in the lives of the faithful. Yet Luther recognized that believers also succumb to temptation at times, and he sought to defy the despair that can beset those who fall victim to temptation, consoling the believer caught in this struggle between sin and trust in God that goes on continually throughout this life: ‘All temptations which Satan employs in order to drive a person to despair or to cause him to disdain and blaspheme God must be regarded as merely sufferings but not as ultimate realities due to divine judgment.’57 Nonetheless, the struggle against sin is not optional: ‘the whole life of the Christian is a life of repentance’, Luther commented in his Ninety-five Theses on Indulgences (1517). At that point he was probably echoing certain medieval predecessors,58 but his description of the repetition of the Holy Spirit’s baptismal action in daily practice in his Small Catechism expresses his mature form of this thought, describing it as the drowning and dying of the ‘old creature’ in us with all sins and evil desires and the resurrection

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Martin Luther, Vorlesung über 1. Johannesbrief, in vol. 20 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1898), pp. 619–32; Martin Luther, Lectures on the First Epistle of St. John, in The Catholic Epistles, Walter A. Hansen (trans.), Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), LW 30 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1967), pp. 228–34. Luther, Vorlesung über 1. Johannesbrief, WA 20:705–707; Luther, Lectures on the First Epistle of St. John, LW 30:273–4. Luther, Enarratio Psalmi XC, WA 40, 3: 542; Luther, Psalm 90, LW 13:110. Martin Luther, Disputatio pro declaration virtutis indulgentiarum, in vol. 1 of WA (Weimar: Bölhau, 1883), p. 233; Martin Luther, Ninety-Five Theses, in Career of the Reformer I, C. M. Jacobs (trans.), Harold J. Grimm (ed.), LW 31 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1957), p. 25. Volker Leppin, ‘“Omnem vitam fidelium penitentiam esse voluit”, Zur Aufnahme mystischer Tradition in Luthers erster Ablaßthese’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 93 (2003): 7–25, demonstrates that in 1517 Luther was echoing Johannes Tauler’s conviction regarding the continuing necessity of humbling oneself before God; cf. Martin Brecht’s response, ‘Luthers neues Verständnis der Buße und die reformatorische Entdeckung’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 101 (2004): 281–91.

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and emergence of a new person who lives before God in righteousness and purity forever.59 This concern for calling defiant sinners to repentance and for consoling the discouraged and despairing who recognize their sin shaped Luther’s distinction of law and gospel. Thus, he could contend that David had fallen from grace when he sinned by seducing Bathsheba and arranging Uriah’s murder (2 Sam. 11.1-27).60 The call to repentance is of vital importance in the Christian’s daily life. ‘If Nathan had not come, David would soon have sinned against the Holy Spirit.’61 Luther applied David’s experience with Uriah, Bathsheba and Nathan to the lives of his hearers and readers directly. ‘It is our sin since we are born and conceived in sin. David speaks here [in Ps. 51] of his own experience’ – experience which Luther believed resembled his own and that of all other believers.62 He noted in commenting on 2 Samuel 12.7 that the purging that the king experienced with Nathan’s call to repentance led to great joy as he heard the words, ‘you shall not die’.63 David needed to be reduced to his own ‘purgatory’, weighed down by the sorrow over his own sin and God’s wrath, to be able to cling to God’s faithfulness in showing mercy. As he wrote the psalm, David knew that from his own experience he should bring other transgressors to repentance (v. 13).64 This tension caused the Wittenberg reformers to stress the need for daily repentance, which Luther explained as the repetition of the Holy Spirit’s action in the baptismal form of God’s re-creative Word.65 Scholars can rightfully debate which aspect of Luther’s thought is the key to understanding the whole. It is probably not his understanding of ‘sin’ since it presumes his understanding of God as the speaking Creator of all things and of human creatures as essentially beings created for a trusting and loving relationship with their Creator. But the daily experience of human beings, Luther believed, does begin with the need to contend with evil in all its forms, above all, the evils for which each individual is responsible, those that damage and destroy personal integrity. From that experience arise the individual’s need for and ability to understand the significance of God’s intervention as Jesus 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

BSELK, pp. 884/885; BC, p. 360. Smalcald Articles, in his 1538 revision for publication, BSELK, pp. 764/765; BC, p. 319. Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, WA 40, 2.318–321. Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, WA 40, 2.325–326. Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, WA 40, 2.409–410. Luther, Vorlesungen über die Psalmen 2, 51, 45, WA 40, 2.437. BSELK, p. 884/885, BC 360, cf. Jonathan D. Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 151–73; Trigg, ‘Luther on Baptism and Penance’, in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and L’ubomír Batka (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 317–20; Robert Kolb, Martin Luther, Confessor of the Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 135–41.



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Christ in human history to suffer death in order to bury human sin and to rise from the dead to restore those who trust in him eternal life with God. Therefore, without understanding the depth and breadth of Luther’s teaching on sin, one does not grasp the larger body of the Wittenberg reformer’s teaching.

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John Calvin frames his understanding of human sin within the context of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. On the one hand, Calvin says that the knowledge of ourselves should lead us directly to the knowledge of God, based on the blessings of God that all human beings experience in themselves. ‘For, quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.’1 On the other hand, no one can be aware of the poverty we experience in ourselves without being led to seek in God what we lack in ourselves. ‘Each of us must, then, be so stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God.’2 If the first form of self-knowledge leads to a dynamic of gratitude, by which we follow the flow of blessings from ourselves back to God, the second form of self-knowledge leads to a dynamic of humility, by which we sincerely seek in God all that we lack in ourselves. ‘Thus, not only will we, in fasting and hungering, seek thence what we lack; but, in being aroused by fear, we shall learn humility.’3 Calvin’s understanding of sin will be guided by these two irreducible dynamics of gratitude and humility. We cannot accentuate the nature and force of sin to the point of denying that we still experience an abundance of good things from God in this life, for that would undermine gratitude. On the other hand, we cannot accentuate the good things that remain in us in this life to the point of denying the full nature and force of sin, as that would undermine humility. John Calvin, Inst. I.i.1, Ioannis Calvini opera selecta, Peter Barth, Wilhelm Niesel and Dora Scheuner(eds) (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1926–52), vol. III, p. 31, lines 12–16; henceforth OS; Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 35–6; henceforth LCC. 2 Inst. I.i.1, OS III.31.24–26; LCC 36. 3 Inst. I.i.1, OS III.31.20–21; LCC 36. 1

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Sin and Self-Knowledge Calvin is aware of how difficult it is for us to come to the true knowledge of ourselves. One of the major effects of the force of sin is the way our pride blinds us and keeps us from coming to the knowledge of ourselves. ‘For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy – this pride is innate in all of us – unless by clear proofs we stand convinced of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity.’4 Our blindness is caused above all else by our inordinate love of ourselves, which leads us to seek to know only good things about ourselves, and not the evil within us. ‘For, since blind self-love is innate in all mortals, they are most freely persuaded that nothing inheres in them that deserves to be considered hateful.’5 If we only look to ourselves, we will deceive ourselves into thinking that the image of goodness we project to the world is actually true and solid goodness rather than a form of hypocrisy. ‘For, because all of us are inclined by nature to hypocrisy, a kind of empty image of righteousness in place of righteousness itself abundantly satisfies us.’6 Such hypocrisy not only afflicts those who know themselves to be guilty before God, but it also deceives every person before God, ‘prone as we are to pamper and flatter ourselves.’7 Given how inscrutable we are to ourselves, and how much we deceive ourselves by our pride and self-love, we will only come to know ourselves if we first come to know God. ‘Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.’8 Only the presence of God can overcome our self-love and pride, so that the knowledge of our sin and poverty engenders genuine humility in us. ‘As a consequence, we must infer that man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.’9 Calvin is therefore not only interested in the right definition of sin so that he clearly expresses its nature and force, but he also is above all interested in bringing us to a genuine experience and awareness of the nature and force of sin in ourselves, because only this awareness will create genuine humility in us. ‘[W]hoever is utterly cast down and overwhelmed by the awareness of his calamity, poverty, nakedness, and disgrace has thus advanced farthest in 6 7 8 9 4 5

Inst. I.i.2, OS III.32.13–16; LCC 37. Inst. II.i.2, OS III.229.22–24; LCC 243. Inst. I.i.2, OS III.32.18–20; LCC 38. Inst. III.xii.4, OS IV.211.30–31; LCC 758. Inst. I.i.2, OS III.32.10–12; LCC 37. Inst. I.i.3, OS III.33.18–20; LCC 39.



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knowledge of himself.’10 This holds true if we first come to know ourselves as impoverished and are led thereby to the knowledge of God as the author and fountain of every good thing. ‘Thus, from the feeling of our own ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, and – what is more – depravity and corruption, we recognize that the true light of wisdom, sound virtue, full abundance of every good, and purity of righteousness rest in the Lord alone.’11 This also holds true if we first contemplate the majesty of God, and then descend into ourselves in the presence of God. ‘Hence that dread and wonder with which Scripture commonly represents the saints as stricken and overcome whenever they felt the presence of God.’12 In either case, the serious awareness of our poverty and sin will lead us to seek in God all that we are aware that we lack in ourselves. ‘For there is no danger of man’s depriving himself of too much so long as he learns that in God must be recouped what he himself lacks.’13 However, given the dynamic of gratitude that must always accompany the dynamic of humility, we must not exaggerate our poverty and sinfulness to the point of denying the abundance of good things we also experience in this life. ‘But knowledge of ourselves lies first in considering what we were given at creation and how generously God continues his favor towards us’, so that we become aware that ‘there is in us nothing of our own, but that we hold on sufferance whatever God has bestowed upon us. Hence we are ever dependent on him.’14 In order to keep us from denying the goodness of the Creator due to an exaggerated awareness of our sin and corruption, Calvin frames the knowledge of ourselves as fallen in light of the knowledge of ourselves as originally created by God. He does this not only to preserve the dynamic of gratitude noted previously, but also to prevent us from blaming God for the poverty and corruption we experience in ourselves, as though God created us this way. ‘For in this excuse, impiety thinks it has sufficient defense, if it is able to claim that whatever defects it possesses have in some way proceeded from God. It does not hesitate, if it is reproved, to contend with God himself, and to impute to him the fault of which it is deservedly accused.’15 So great is the deceptive power of our pride and self-love that we would readily blame God for the sin and corruption we experience in ourselves, rather than allow the awareness of our poverty to create humility in us. In order to prevent this from happening, we must first come 12 13 14 15 10 11

Inst. II.ii.10, OS III.252.20–22; LCC 267. Inst. I.i.1, OS III.31–32; LCC 36. Inst. I.i.3, OS III.33.13–15; LCC 38–9. Inst. II.ii.10, OS III.252.22–24; LCC 267. Inst. II.i.1, OS III.228.20–26; LCC 242. Inst. I.xv.1, OS III.174.4–8; LCC 183.

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to know ourselves as originally created by God, in order to know ourselves as sinners in light of that original creation. ‘Therefore we must so deal with the calamity of mankind that we may cut off every shift, and may vindicate God’s justice from every accusation.’16 By bringing us to the knowledge of ourselves as originally created, we not only reinforce gratitude for the good things we still experience in this life, but we also come to know for ourselves that the poverty and destitution we currently experience is due to human sin, and not to God’s original creative work. Calvin makes this clear when he first introduces this theme in the Institutes: ‘The miserable ruin, into which the rebellion of the first man cast us, especially compels us to look upwards.’17 But how do we know what we were like as originally created, if all we perceive now is the ruin into which the sin of Adam cast us? We can say with confidence that we were originally created in the image of God, and that this image even remains in us as sinful creatures. However, that image has in large part been ruined and corrupted, so that it is almost impossible for us to discern what the image of God could be based on our present experience. ‘Therefore, even though we grant that God’s image was not totally annihilated and destroyed in him, yet it was so corrupted that whatever remains is a frightful deformity.’18 We shall see below how Calvin further develops the image of God that remains in sinful humanity, but for now we need to confront the way he addresses the real problem of knowing our original creation now that we are in the midst of the ruin brought about by Adam’s sin. Since Genesis has little to say to clarify what it means to be created in the image of God, Calvin looks to the restoration of the image of God by Christ in order to infer from that what it must have been like to be created in the image of God before we fell into sin. ‘From this we infer that, to begin with, God’s image was visible in the light of the mind, in the uprightness of the heart, and in the soundness of all the parts.’19 Given this original integrity, Adam must be seen as the one responsible for casting humanity into ruin by his voluntary sin. ‘Yet his choice of good and evil was free, and not that alone, but the highest rectitude was in his mind and will, and all the organic parts were rightly composed to obedience, until in destroying himself he corrupted his own blessings.’20 The knowledge of ourselves as originally created in the image of God provides yet another way by which we might come to the knowledge of ourselves as sinful. 18 19 20 16 17

Inst. I.xv.1, OS III.174.14–17; LCC 183–4. Inst. I.i.1, OS III.31.18–20; LCC 36. Inst. I.xv.4, OS III.179.8–11; LCC 189. Inst. I.xv.4, OS III.179.25–27; LCC 189. Inst. I.xv.8, OS III.186.8–11; LCC 195.



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We were created in the image of God so that we might be united to God in eternal life, which would be our eternal happiness. We are still in a sense created in the image of God, but the sin of Adam has corrupted our nature so that we can no longer attain the goal of our creation, even as we are constantly urged on toward that goal by the image of God that remains within each one of us. ‘For we cannot think upon either our first condition or to what purpose we were formed without being prompted to meditate upon immortality, and to yearn after the Kingdom of God. That recognition, however, far from encouraging pride in us, discourages us and casts us into humility. For what is that origin? It is that from which we have fallen. What is the end of our creation? It is that from which we have been completely estranged, so that sick of our miserable lot we groan, and in groaning we sigh for that lost worthiness.’21 The knowledge of ourselves as created reveals why we cannot help but seek eternal life in union with God, no matter how sinful we have become; but the knowledge of our sin reveals why we can never attain that for which we seek, unless God provides us with the remedy for our sin. ‘From this source arise abhorrence and displeasure with ourselves, as well as true humility; and thence is kindled a new zeal to seek God, in whom each of us may recover those good things which we have utterly and completely lost.’22

Sin, Adam and Human Nature The transition from our original creation to our present destitution took place in the sinful act of Adam. The universal experience of human sin and depravity must be traced back to this act of Adam as its sole source. Hence in order to come to the full knowledge of ourselves as sinners, we must come to a fuller understanding of the sin of Adam, in order better to understand how such universal calamity could have resulted from this one sin. The original integrity in which Adam was created, which expressed the image of God in him, was made possible by the fact that reason was the governing power in his life, which kept all other powers of the soul in order. ‘Therefore God provided man’s soul with a mind, by which to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong; and, with the light of reason as guide, to distinguish what should be followed from what should be avoided.’23 If the fall into sin destroyed this integrity, then the

Inst. II.i.3, OS III.230–231; LCC 244. Inst. II.i.1, OS III.229.5–8; LCC 242. 23 Inst. I.xv.8, OS III.185.26–28; LCC 195. 21 22

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sin that plunged us into ruin must have taken place in reason itself, and not in the lesser powers of the soul. However, God did not leave Adam and Eve to follow the guidance of unaided reason, but rather placed them under his Word. They could stand in their integrity so long as their reason submitted itself to the Word of God to guide their lives, but were they to question the truth of this Word, they would begin the process that led them into ruin. Calvin therefore follows Luther’s reading of the sin of Adam in his Lectures on Genesis, and claims that the sin that started the plunge of humanity into its present calamity is to be found in the unfaithfulness of Adam and Eve to the Word of God. ‘Since the woman through unfaithfulness was led away from God’s Word by the serpent’s deceit, it is already clear that disobedience was the beginning of the Fall. This Paul confirms, teaching that all were lost through the disobedience of one man. [Rom. 5.19.]’24 Once they disobey God’s Word, they unleash a host of other sins that further corrupt and ruin the original integrity of human nature. ‘Unfaithfulness, then, was the root of the Fall. But thereafter ambition and pride, together with ungratefulness, arose, because Adam by seeking more than was granted him shamefully spurned God’s great bounty, which had been lavished upon him.’25 In his commentary on Genesis, Calvin further elaborates on the dynamic of disobedience that the unfaithfulness of Adam and Eve set in motion. ‘If any one prefers a shorter explanation, we may say unbelief has opened the door to ambition, but ambition has proved the parent of rebellion, to the end that men, having cast aside the fear of God, might shake off his yoke.’26 Once the fear of God is removed by means of ambition, the powers of the soul prove to be disobedient to reason, so that instead of reason governing our passions, our passions and lusts now govern the whole of our lives, especially our reason and will. ‘Lastly, faithlessness opened the door to ambition, and ambition was indeed the mother of obstinate disobedience; as a result, men, having cast off the fear of God, threw themselves wherever lust carried them.’27 Calvin insists that the unfaithfulness of Adam and Eve plunged all of humanity into a catastrophe from which only God in Christ by the Holy Spirit Inst. II.i.4, OS III.231.36–40; LCC 245. Inst. II.i.4, OS III.232.6–9; LCC 245. 26 Comm. Genesis 3:6, Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Wilhelm Baum, Edward Cunitz and Eduard Reuss (Brunswick: A. Schwetschke and Son (M. Bruhn), 1863–1900), vol. 23, p. 61; henceforth CO; The Commentaries of John Calvin on the Old Testament, 30 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843–8), vol. 1, p. 153; henceforth CTS. 27 Inst. II.i.4, OS III.232.17–19; LCC 246. 24 25



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can rescue them. Their disobedience not only changed human nature, but it also changed the cosmos itself, spreading the curse of God throughout the universe, and subjecting innocent creatures to corruption and death simply due to human sin. ‘Nor is it any wonder that he consigned his race to ruin by his rebellion when he perverted the whole order of nature in heaven and earth. ‘All creatures’, says Paul, ‘are groaning’ [Rom. 8.22], ‘subject to corruption, not of their own will’ [Rom. 8.20]. If the cause is sought, there is no doubt they are bearing part of the punishment deserved by man, for whose use they were created.’28 The sin of Adam and Eve changed human nature itself, for by abandoning God, they lost the good things God had bestowed on them by which they might inherit eternal life; and once these blessings were lost, their place was taken by a whole host of evil things. ‘Therefore, after the heavenly image was obliterated in him, he was not the only one to suffer this punishment – that, in place of wisdom, virtue, holiness, truth, and justice, with which adornments he had been clad, there came forth the most filthy plagues, blindness, impotence, impurity, vanity, and injustice – but he also entangled and immersed his offspring in the same miseries.’29 Calvin is aware, however, that a rather vexing question is raised by these claims. Does it not seem both absurd and morally offensive for the sin of Adam and Eve to change the cosmos and human nature itself, so that all are condemned for the sin they alone committed, and all are corrupted by their individual unfaithfulness and disobedience? Calvin acknowledges that this question led Pelagius to deny the doctrine of original sin, claiming instead that the descendants of Adam and Eve are condemned for imitating Adam’s disobedience, not by means of Adam’s disobedience itself. But instead of demonstrating how it makes moral sense for the sin and poverty of Adam to be inherited by all of his descendants, Calvin responds by claiming that original sin can be demonstrated from experience and Scripture. Even the blindness of the philosophers to the reality of original sin is itself part of the proof of original sin. ‘Surely this stupor itself was a signal proof of original sin. For all who are not utterly blind perceive that no part of us is sound; that the mind is smitten with blindness, and infected with innumerable errors; that all the affections of the heart are full of stubbornness and wickedness; that vile lusts, or other diseases equally fatal, reign there; and that all the senses burst forth with many vices.’30 When proving the doctrine from Scripture, he first turns to the way Inst. II.i.5, OS III.232.31–36; LCC 246. Inst. II.i.5, OS III.232–233; LCC 246. 30 Comm. Genesis 3:6, CO 23:61–2; CTS 1:154. 28 29

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David says he was born in iniquity (Ps. 51.5), followed by Paul’s statement that death came into the world through sin (Rom. 5.12), making all of us children of wrath (Eph. 2.3).31 But how does Adam’s sin become my sin, simply by my being born? Calvin appears to give two different answers that appear to be in considerable tension with each other. On the one hand, Calvin insists that by his sin, Adam lost all the good things he received from God by which he might inherit eternal life, and this loss of blessings resulted in the corruption and defilement of his human nature. Once this happened, he could only give birth to children who resembled his impoverished and corrupted state. ‘For as Adam at his first creation had received for his posterity as well as for himself the gifts of divine grace (divinae gratiae dotes), so by falling from the Lord, in himself he corrupted, vitiated, depraved, and ruined our nature – having lost the image of God (abdicates a Dei similitudine), the only seed which he could have produced was that which bore resemblance to himself (sui simile). We have, therefore, all sinned, because we are all imbued with natural corruption, and for this reason are wicked and perverse.’32 This makes it sound as though original sin is passed on from Adam to the whole of humanity by procreation itself, so that I receive this corruption from my parents, and ultimately from Adam and Eve. ‘Nor is it wonderful that the depravity which is inborn in us from our parents is reckoned as sin before God; for while the seed of sin is still hidden, He perceives and condemns it.’33 Calvin thinks that this is why David says that he was conceived in iniquity (Ps. 51.5): he ‘refers to original sin with the view of aggravating his guilt, acknowledging that he had not contracted this or that sin for the first time lately, but had been born into the world with the seed of every iniquity.’34 In this description, Calvin insists that Adam’s sin changed his nature, so that he now has sinful seed that can only give rise to sinful descendants. ‘For we are not now born such as Adam was at first created, but we are the adulterous seed of degenerate and sinful man.’35 Calvin reinforces this biological description of the transmission of sin by describing sin as an infection or contagion transmitted from Adam to all of his descendants. ‘Therefore, Adam so corrupted himself that infection spread from him to all his descendants.’36 Calvin also uses the metaphor of pollution or Comm. Genesis 3.6, CO 23:62; CTS 1:155. Comm. Romans 5.12, CO 49:95; Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959–72), vol. 6, pp. 111–12, henceforth CNTC. 33 Comm. Ephesians 2:3, CNTC 8.142. 34 Comm. Psalm 51:5, CO 31:513; CTS 9:290. 35 Comm. Ephesians 2:3, CNTC 8.142. 36 Inst. II.i.6, OS III.235.28–30; LCC 249. 31 32



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contamination to describe the way that original sin naturally flows from Adam to all of humanity. ‘We hear that the uncleanness of the parents is so transmitted to the children that all without exception are defiled at their begetting. But we will not find the beginning of this pollution unless we go back to the first parent of all, as its source.’37 However, this biological and natural model of the transmission of Adam’s sin to all his descendants raises a major problem for Calvin. Calvin insists that the sin of Adam corrupts the powers of the soul in particular, especially our reason and will, and not only the passions of the body. However, Calvin does not think that the soul of the child is generated by the souls of the parents, but is rather created directly by God as an immortal yet created essence. Thus there is no way for original sin to be transmitted naturally from Adam to his descendants, as the soul is not a product of human procreation. In order to address this problem, Calvin claims that God willed to give all of humanity the good things that he gave to Adam. Thus when Adam lost these blessings in himself, he thereby lost them for us, thereby eliminating the need to explain this loss by means of the natural transmission of sin to his descendants. ‘Should any object that generation is confined to bodies, and that souls can never derive anything in common from one another, I would reply, that Adam, when he was endued at his creation with the gifts of the Spirit, did not sustain a private character, but represented all mankind, who may be considered as having been endued with these gifts in his person; and from this view it necessarily follows that when he fell, we all forfeited along with him our original integrity.’38 Thus the ultimate reason we inherit the poverty and sin of Adam is that God willed this to happen from eternity. ‘Yet predestination, whether they will or not, manifests itself in Adam’s posterity. For it did not take place by reason of nature that, by the guilt of one parent, all were cut off from salvation.’39 In this view, there is no need to describe the way corrupt seed gives rise to corrupt offspring, or the way the infection of sin is spread to children like a contagion, because souls cannot generate other souls. Hence all of the offspring of Adam are guilty of sin and condemnation because God willed that this be so. ‘Again I ask: whence does it happen that Adam’s fall irremediably involved so many peoples, together with their infant offspring, in eternal death unless it so pleased God?’40 However, Calvin seems to use this appeal to the eternal will of God to 40 37 38 39

Inst. II.i.6, OS III.234.16–20; LCC 248. Comm. Psalm 51.5, CO 31:514; CTS 9:291. Inst. III.xxiii.7, OS IV.401.15–17; LCC 955. Inst. IIIxxiii.7, OS IV.401.25–27; LCC 955.

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explain how the disease and contagion of sin is spread from Adam to all his descendants. This does not take place on the basis of any natural causality, but simply because God wants it to happen. ‘For the contagion does not take its origin from the substance of the flesh or soul, but because it had been so ordained by God that the first man should at one and the same time have and lose, both for himself and for his descendants, the gifts that God had bestowed upon him.’41 In his definition of original sin, Calvin emphasizes the way that sin corrupts the soul, and the way sin is inherited, even though it is hard to see how one soul can inherit anything from another. ‘Original sin, therefore, seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath, then also brings forth in us those works which Scripture calls “works of the flesh” [Gal 5.19]. And that is properly what Paul often calls sin.’42 This definition makes it quite clear that Calvin sees sin much more in terms of the impoverishment and corruption of human nature, and only secondarily in terms of the discrete actions of will that are termed ‘sins’. These sins are produced by the corruption of the soul, and therefore reveal the nature and force of this deeper corruption and depravity. ‘For our nature is not only destitute and empty of good, but so fertile and fruitful of every evil that it cannot be idle.’43 The best way to respond to our own particular sins is to trace them to the corruption in our souls that is original sin, and then to trace that sin to its source in Adam. This is what David did once Nathan brought him to confess his sin with regard to his adultery with Bathsheba and the death of her husband that he caused. ‘He now proceeds further than the mere acknowledgement of one or of many sins, confessing that he brought nothing but sin with him into the world, and that his nature was entirely depraved. He is thus led by the consideration of one offense of peculiar atrocity to the conclusion that he was born in iniquity, and was absolutely destitute of all spiritual good. Indeed, every sin should convince us of the general truth of the corruption of our nature.’44 Unless we move from particular sins to the underlying poverty and corruption of our nature, we do not really understand sin at all. ‘But the Bible, both in this and other places, clearly asserts that we are born in sin, and that it exists within us as a disease fixed in our nature.’45 43 44 45 41 42

Inst. II.i.7, OS III.236.14–17; LCC 250. Inst. II.i.8, OS III.236–237; LCC 251. Inst. II.i.8, OS III.258.7–9; LCC 252. Comm. Psalm 51.5, CO 31:512–13; CTS 9:290. Comm. Psalm 51.5, CO 31:513; CTS 9:290.



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Sin and God’s Gifts Calvin further specifies the poverty and corruption of fallen human nature by means of a definition of the consequences of the sin of Adam that the scholastic theologians borrowed from Augustine: the supernatural gifts were lost, while the natural gifts were corrupted. Calvin understands the supernatural gifts to be ‘faith, love of God, charity toward neighbor, zeal for holiness and for righteousness’.46 Since these are the gifts human beings need by which to be united to God in eternal life, the privation of these gifts means the alienation of all human beings from God. Calvin knows that these gifts are supernatural, and were lost in the sin of Adam, primarily because Christ restores these gifts to the elect through the Holy Spirit. ‘All these, since Christ restores them in us, are considered adventitious, and beyond nature; and for this reason we infer that they were taken away.’47 The loss of the supernatural gifts also entails the corruption of the natural gifts, which Calvin breaks down in terms of the intellect and the will. The fall did not destroy human nature entirely, so the natural gifts of reason and will remain in all humans. However, these natural gifts have been fundamentally ruined and corrupted, so that they are no longer in the integrity in which they originally existed in Adam. But how do we come to understand the corruption of our natural gifts, without on the one hand denying the good gifts of God that remain even after the fall (the dynamic of gratitude), and without on the other hand fueling self-love and ambition by ascribing too much to fallen human beings (the dynamic of humility)? Calvin follows the same logic with regard to the corruption of the natural gifts as he did with regard to the loss of the supernatural gifts: he starts with what God in Christ does by the Spirit to restore corrupt human nature, and infers from that work of restoration the corruption that is being repaired. ‘If we were convinced that our nature lacks everything that our Heavenly Father bestows on his elect through the Spirit of regeneration – a fact that should be beyond controversy – we would have here no occasion for doubt!’48 By beginning with the work of regeneration, Calvin can make room for the gifts of God that are still experienced in this life after the fall of Adam without undermining humility, for these would only benefit us in this life, and would not help us to attain eternal life.

Inst. II.ii.12, OS III.255.2–4; LCC 270. Inst. II.ii.12, OS III.255.4–6; LCC 270. 48 Inst. II.ii.20, OS III.262.1–4; LCC 278. 46 47

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Once this space is created, however, Calvin discovers an astonishing range of benefits that God continues to lavish on fallen humanity through the Holy Spirit. Even though these gifts do not regenerate us or lead us to be reunited with God, we would still be sinfully ungrateful if we did not acknowledge the extent of these blessings. Even the presence of reason in fallen humanity shows the free blessing of God that remains after Adam. ‘For if [God] had not spared us, our fall would have entailed the destruction of our whole nature.’49 The presence of reason and intellect in all humans constitutes for Calvin the lineaments of the image of God that remain even after it was corrupted and ruined by the sin of Adam. ‘The reason with which they are endued, and by which they can distinguish between good and evil; the principle of religion which is planted in them; their intercourse with each other, which is preserved from being broken up by certain sacred bonds; the regard to what is becoming, and the sense of shame which guilt awakens in them, as well as their continuing to be governed by laws; all these things are clear indications of pre-eminent and celestial wisdom.’50 Even though the distinction between good and evil, and the principle of religion planted in each person, are not enough to reveal to us who God is and what God’s will is towards us, they are enough to render us without excuse, as we all know that there is some God who is to be worshipped and obeyed. Over and above the preservation of our reason, God lavishes an abundance of gifts on humanity through the mechanical and liberal arts discovered and developed by the learned pagans. These arts reveal how much of reason and understanding remain, for ‘this evidence clearly testifies to a universal apprehension of reason and understanding by nature implanted in men.’51 But the development of each of these arts is also a unique gift of the Holy Spirit, for which we must be grateful. ‘Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God.’52 The godly are assisted by these arts as much as the ungodly, as one can see by the way Calvin uses the mechanical and liberal arts in his interpretation of Scripture, and 52 49 50 51

Inst. II.ii.17, OS III.259.34–36; LCC 276. Comm. Psalm 8.5, CO 31:92; CTS 8:102. Inst. II.ii.14, OS III.257.31–33; LCC 273. Inst. II.II.15, OS III.258.10–18; LCC 273–4.



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in his office as teacher. ‘But if the Lord has willed that we be helped in physics, dialectic, mathematics, and other like disciplines, by the work and ministry of the ungodly, let us use this assistance. For if we neglect God’s gift freely offered in these arts, we ought to suffer just punishments for our sloths.’53 However, the presence of these arts among the ungodly is of no help with regard to the saving knowledge of God in Christ. In spite of all the endowments of reason and intellect that remain in fallen human beings, ‘the way to the Kingdom of God is open only to him whose mind has been made new by the illumination of the Holy Spirit’.54

Sin and the Corruption of the Will Calvin uses the same method in determining the corruption of the will. He begins with the work of the regeneration of the will by Christ through the Spirit, and then infers the extent of the will’s corruption. The power of the will is a special point of contention with the Roman Church, for Calvin is aware that Rome places a great deal of emphasis on the cooperation of the will with grace, both in coming to faith, and in being justified by the inpouring of hope and love. Rome insists that the corruption of the will in Adam did not go so far as to make such cooperation with grace impossible, for by this cooperation grace becomes efficacious in us, whereas if we resist this grace, we condemn ourselves by our own choice. ‘They toil hard in their schools to reconcile free-will with the grace of God. Such a free-will, I mean, as they conceive of, which can turn by its own movement and have a peculiar and separate capacity, by which it can co-operate with the grace of God.’55 Calvin does not deny that all human beings still have wills by which they can shape their lives by their own self-determination, but he appeals to Scripture, as well as to Augustine and Bernard, to insist that we freely and willingly enslave ourselves to sin unless we are freed by the regenerating work of God in Christ. This is revealed with particular clarity in Paul’s statement that God is at work in us both to will and to do according to his pleasure (Phil. 2.13). ‘This is the true artillery (machina) for destroying all haughtiness; this the sword for killing all pride, when we hear that we are utterly nothing, and can do nothing, except through the grace of God alone. I mean supernatural grace, which comes forth from the Spirit Inst. II.ii.16, OS III.259.14–17; LCC 275. Inst. II.ii.20, OS III.263.7–9; LCC 279. 55 Comm. Philippians 2.13, CO 52:31; CNTC 8:254 53 54

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of regeneration.’56 Since Paul ascribes both the intention and inclination of the will, as well as the execution of this inclination, to the grace of God within us, there is nothing in us by which we might cooperate with the grace of God. Even our acceptance of grace is an effect of grace, and is not rooted in the will apart from the work of grace. ‘For we acknowledge that we have a will from nature; but as it is evil through the corruption of sin, it begins to be good only when it has been reformed by God. Nor do we say that a man does anything good without willing it, but only when his inclination is ruled by the Spirit of God.’57 Calvin reinforces his understanding of the corruption of the will by means of the prayers in Scripture, especially the request of David that God create a clean heart within him (Ps. 51.10). ‘By employing the term create, he expresses his persuasion that nothing less than a miracle could effect his reformation, and emphatically declares that repentance is the gift of God.’58 By asking God to create this heart within him, David’s prayer refutes the claim of the Roman theologians that there remains within the will the capacity to cooperate with grace once it is freely offered to us. ‘The Sophists grant the necessity of the aids of the Spirit, and allow that assisting grace must both go before and come after; but by assigning a middle place to the free will of man, they rob God of a great part of his glory. David, by the word which he here uses, describes the work of God in renewing the heart in a manner suitable to its extraordinary nature, representing it as the formation of a new creature.’59 Calvin sees the same dynamic at work in the prophecy of Ezekiel that God will replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, so that we might obey the will of God from the heart (Ezek. 36.26-7). ‘If, therefore, a stone is transformed into flesh when God converts us to zeal for the right, whatever is of our own will is effaced. What takes place in us is wholly from God.’60 Calvin seeks to demonstrate that this interpretation of the corruption of the will is fully supported not only by Scripture, but also by the writings of Augustine, especially those late in his career. ‘Now we have from Augustine’s own lips the testimony that we especially wish to obtain: not only is grace offered by the Lord, which by anyone’s free choice may be accepted or rejected; but it is this very grace which forms both choice and will in the heart, so that whatever good works then follow are the fruit and effect of grace; and it has no other will obeying it except the will that it has made.’61 58 59 60 61 56 57

Comm. Philippians 2.13, CO 52:31; CNTC 8:253–4. Comm. Philippians 2.13, CO 52:31; CNTC 8:254. Comm. Psalm 51.10, CO 31:518; CTS 9:298. Comm. Psalm 51.10, CO 31:518; CTS 9:298–9. Inst. II.iii.6, OS III.280.1–3; LCC 297. Inst. II.iii.13, OS III.289–290; LCC 308.



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The inability of Roman theologians properly to come to an understanding of the extent of the corruption of the will is ultimately rooted in their inability to understand the nature of original sin itself, which for Calvin is defined as concupiscence. If we are sinners before God even before we have the capacity to act, as is the case with infants, then sin must lie deeper than the intention of the will, in the sinful desires that lead to intentional sin. ‘Those who have said that original sin is ‘concupiscence’ have used an appropriate word, if only it be added – something that most will by no means concede – that whatever is in man, from the understanding to the will, from the soul even to the flesh, has been defiled and crammed with this concupiscence.’62 Our intentional sins should lead us to realize that even our sinful desires are sinful, and are enough to condemn us before God, even if we do not consent to them. But the sinfulness of concupiscence is hidden from the reason and conscience of fallen human beings. ‘But in all our keeping of the law we quite fail to take our concupiscence into account. For the natural man refuses to be led to recognize the diseases of his lusts. The light of nature is extinguished before it even enters upon this abyss.’63 The sinfulness of concupiscence can only be revealed by the law of God, which is why Paul accentuates this sin so much in his discussion of the nature of the law. ‘Howbeit, I had not known sin, except through the law. Sin, therefore, dwells in us, and not in the law. Its cause is the corrupt desire of our flesh, and we come to know it by our knowledge of the righteousness of God, which is declared to us in the law.’64 According to Calvin, God not only forbids actions based on consent to concupiscent desires, but also forbids us to have those desires themselves. This goes contrary to the way both civil lawyers and philosophers think about sin. ‘God, therefore, in this last commandment demands from us such integrity that no corrupt lust should move us to evil, however much we may withhold our consent. it was for this reason that I said that Paul’s thought here goes beyond the capacity of ordinary men to understand. Civil laws avowedly punish intentions (consilia) and not events. Philosophers with greater refinement locate both vices and virtues in the mind (in animo). God, however, in this precept goes to the heart of our concupiscence, which, because it is more concealed than the will, is not reckoned as a vice.’65 Hence Calvin rejects the distinction the Roman Church makes between venial sins, which lack consent of will, and mortal sins, which manifest the consent of the will; for according to 65 62 63 64

Inst. II.i.8, OS III.238.9–13; LCC 252. Inst. II.ii.24, OS 267.12–16; LCC 284. Comm. Romans 7.7, CO 49:124; CNTC 6:142. Comm. Romans 7.7, CO 49:124; CNTC 6:143.

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Calvin, the law of God condemns concupiscence even when there is no consent. ‘For the Lord forbids us not only to resolve upon and to plot something that involves another’s loss, but even to be kindled and to burn with covetousness. But God’s curse ever presses upon the transgression of the law. There is no reason, then, for us to exempt any covetings, however light, from the judgment of death.’66 We only come to a serious awareness of our own sinfulness when God reveals our sinfulness to us by the law, especially by its prohibition of unconsented-to concupiscence. ‘For if by the law covetousness is not dragged from its lair, it destroys wretched man so secretly that he does not even feel its fatal stab.’67 The law alone reveals the sin of concupiscence, and therefore reveals the depth of our corruption due to sin. ‘The right application of this doctrine is, for every man to examine in good earnest his own life by the perfection which is enjoined upon us in the law. In this way he will be forced to confess that all men without exception have deserved everlasting damnation; and each will acknowledge in respect to himself that he is a thousand times undone.’68 Only in this way do we acquire genuine humility, so that we turn to God’s mercy out of a deep and sincere awareness of the depth of our sinfulness, which evades even the most penetrating self-examination. ‘In summoning himself and others before the judgment-seat of God, he warns himself and them, that although their consciences do not condemn them, they are not on that account absolved; for God sees far more clearly than men’s consciences, since even those who look most attentively into themselves, do not perceive a great part of the sins with which they are chargeable.’69

69 66 67 68

Inst. II.viii.58, OS III.397.3–7; LCC 422. Inst. II.vii.6, OS III.332.27–29; LCC 355. Comm. Psalm 130.3-4, CO 32:334; CTS 12:129–30. Comm. Psalm 19.12, CO 31:205; CTS 8:328.

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Friedrich Schleiermacher Kevin M. Vander Schel

From the publication of the first edition of his Christian Faith, Schleiermacher’s treatment of the doctrine of sin has elicited frequent criticism and puzzlement in his readers. In large part, these complaints echo broader criticisms of Schleiermacher’s landmark dogmatic work, as in the claims that he collapses theology into anthropology or that his presentation of Christian piety reduces to an abstract nature mysticism. For many, the apparently subjectivist approach in Schleiermacher’s systematic discussion of religious feeling (Gefühl), or immediate self-consciousness, seemed to consign the reality of sin to an inward feature of individual experience and to undermine the centrality of the doctrine of atonement.1 Yet the perplexed response to Schleiermacher’s treatment of sin also stems from the unique manner in which he reframes the doctrine and the unusual place he assigns it in his theological system. Instead of discussing sin together with the doctrine of creation, or in conjunction with the primordial fall of humanity depicted in Genesis 3, he describes sin first in its relation to the living fellowship with the Redeemer and the working of grace in Christian community. The doctrine of sin, within Schleiermacher’s thought, finds its proper place in the ever-present opposition of sin and grace in Christian self-consciousness, and the nature of sin is properly understood only in the light of divine grace. On the common criticism of a fundamental anthropological orientation or nature mysticism in Schleiermacher’s thought, see Christine Helmer’s insightful analysis in Theology and the End of Doctrine (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), pp. 39–57. Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr offer two prominent criticisms of Schleiermacher’s understanding of sin. Barth objects to the relation of sin and self-consciousness in Schleiermacher’s treatment, while Niebuhr judges it as unable to adequately overcome the challenge of Pelagianism. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), pp. 319–34; and Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), pp. 245–8. For a discussion of further criticisms, see Maureen Junker, Das Urbild des Gottesbewußtseins, Schleiermacher Archiv, vol. 8 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990), pp. 162–6; and Walter E. Wyman, Jr., ‘Rethinking the Christian Doctrine of Sin: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hick’s “Irenaean Type,”’ JR 74 (2)(1994): 199–201, 213–17.

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Schleiermacher’s dogmatic writings offer no single or fixed definition of sin, and the notion of sin presented in his work corresponds neither to an independent reality nor to a separate feature of Christian experience that could be treated in isolation. Rather, sin becomes manifest in Christian self-consciousness through its intractable opposition to grace, as the active resistance (Widerstand) to the higher life in Christ and as a persistent ‘turning away’ (Abwendung) from God that imprints Christian living with a lingering incompleteness and an ongoing need for redemption.2 The state of sin reflects a ‘positive antagonism (Widerstreit) of the flesh against the spirit,’ an independence of the lower sensuous functions that arrests the impulse towards consciousness of God and predisposes one to external temptation.3 This power of sin is encountered everywhere in human living, a distortion of human nature yet one that is universal and common to all. For Schleiermacher, however, the ubiquity of sin is neither the result of a historical ‘fall,’ as in the Mosaic account of the first sin of Adam and Eve, nor is it the product of some ancient or primeval alteration of human nature. He describes sin instead in unmistakably social terms. The force of sin is ‘something thoroughly collective’ (ein durchaus Gemeinschaftliches), and it is only in its genuinely collective character that sin and guilt are properly understood.4 Sin is overcome, then, not first in the regeneration of single individuals but in the communal life established through the redemptive influence of Christ. Accordingly, Schleiermacher’s account of sin focuses not upon the violation of divine law or the offence against divine wrath but as with his treatment of grace exhibits a pronounced Christocentric shape. The misery of the collective life of sin is known as it is gradually overcome by the blessedness of the new divinely-effected corporate life in Christ, which inaugurates the reign of God in human history.5 It is thereby only in redemption and the election to grace in Christ that one can correctly conceive the place of sin and evil in God’s providential ordering of the world. Schleiermacher’s analysis of sin in the Glaubenslehre unfolds through a critical engagement with existing ecclesiastical formulas, especially in statements concerning the bondage of sin and the scope of human freedom.6 Yet KGA I.13.1, §63, pp. 394–5; CF, p. 262. See also §67.2. KGA I.13.1, §66, p. 405; CF, p. 271. 4 KGA I.13.1, §71.2, p. 431; CF, pp. 287–8. 5 See CF, §§87–8. See also Brian Gerrish, ‘The Atoning Life of Christ,’ in Schleiermacher’s Influences on American Thought and Religious Life, 1835–1920, vol. 1, eds Jeffrey A. Wilcox, Terrence N. Tice and Catherine Kelsey(eds) (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), pp. 220–9. 6 On Schleiermacher’s careful engagement with the creeds in regards to the doctrine of sin, see Walter 2 3



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within his own presentation, these traditional affirmations undergo significant revision and reordering. His treatment proceeds in descriptions of original and actual sin, the persistence of evil in the world, and the relation of sin to the eternal divine causality. Grasping these different elements of Schleiermacher’s account of sin, however, requires first attending to its location in his mature dogmatic system.7

The Place of Sin in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre In a letter to his colleague Friedrich Lücke, Schleiermacher describes his own systematic skill as consisting in a particular talent for organization, and he notes that many misunderstandings of his theology have resulted from an insufficient grasp of the complex order and relations within his system.8 This potential for misunderstanding is perhaps especially pronounced with regard to his doctrine of sin. Schleiermacher treats sin at the beginning of the longer second part of his Glaubenslehre, which sets forth the character of distinctively Christian piety through descriptions of the person and work of Christ, regeneration and sanctification of believers, the communication of the divine Spirit, and the election of the church from the world. Thus, while references to the constraint of religious feeling and the need for redemption are scattered throughout the earlier sections, the discussion of sin itself occurs neither in the introduction’s depiction of piety in general nor in the various divisions that make up the work’s first part – such as the doctrines of creation and preservation, the original perfection of the world and of human beings, or the discussions of divine causality, freedom and knowledge. All of these considerations, for Schleiermacher, still remain preliminary and preparatory to the proper content of dogmatics. They do not yet reveal essential aspects of Christian self-consciousness but articulate formal E. Wyman, Jr., ‘The Role of Protestant Confessions in Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith,’ JR 87(3) (2007), pp. 363–72. 7 For the sake of clarity, the present analysis will be limited to Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre, since the treatment of Christian action in his Christian Ethics (Christliche Sittenlehre) does not present a separate or independent teaching on sin. However, it is worth noting that a clear harmony exists between the two works. In his Christian Ethics, sin is largely discussed with regard to purifying action (reinigendes Handeln), where it appears as a hindrance or obstacle to the working of grace and the leading of the Spirit. See F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Christliche Sittenlehre (Vorlesung im Wintersemester 1826/27). Nach größtenteils unveröffentlichten Hörernachschriften und nach teilweise unveröffentlichten Manuskripten Schleiermachers, ed. Hermann Peiter (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2010), pp. 5–7, 97–243; Kevin M. Vander Schel, Embedded Grace: Christ, History, and the Reign of God in Schleiermacher’s Dogmatics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), pp. 190–4. 8 F. D. E. Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, trans. James Duke and Francis Fiorenza (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 70, 55–60.

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and ‘external’ features of general religious consciousness abstracted from specifically Christian piety.9 The understanding of sin belongs by contrast to what is distinctive in Christian faith, in the relation to the consciousness of grace and the vital connection with the Redeemer. Though always operative in human living outside of and before the influence of Christ, sin is not known in and of itself nor does it arise through any general treatment of natural piety; it is distinguished only through its opposition to the advent of grace in Christ. Consciousness of the antithesis between grace and sin forms the central focus of the second part of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre, and this enduring opposition determines the various moments of the Christian life. Indeed, in concrete experience, Christian piety reflects a constant vacillation between impulses toward greater fellowship with God in grace and the arresting of these impulses in sin, as in each moment there ‘occurs a relative havingbeen-turned-away (Abgewendetsein) from God or a having-been-turned-towards (Hingewendetsein) God.’10 Schleiermacher’s descriptions of sin and grace reflect this abiding conflict at the heart of Christian living: The distinctiveness of Christian piety consists in this: that whatever turning away from God there is in our various states, we are conscious of it as our original act, which we call sin; but whatever fellowship (Gemeinschaft) with God is in them, we are conscious of it as resting on a communication from the Redeemer, which we call grace.11

Thus sin and grace are indissolubly linked in Schleiermacher’s thought. Even while sin is discussed apart from grace for the sake of presentation, the treatment always remains proleptic – a reflection of the condition anterior to redemption, in which sin still holds sway. One fully grasps the breadth and depth of sin’s captivity only in the passage to liberation.

Ibid., pp. 58–60. Interpreters have often approached Schleiermacher’s doctrine of sin through an anthropological lens, beginning with an analysis of his conception of religious self-consciousness. See, for example, Derek R. Nelson, ‘Schleiermacher and Ritschl on Individual and Social Sin’, Journal of the History of Modern Theology 16 (2) (2009): 131–40; and David N. Duke, ‘Schleiermacher: Theology Without a Fall’, Perspectives in Religious Studies 9 (1) (1982): 21–37. However, Schleiermacher himself is careful to treat sin in its interrelation with grace. Thus, even the mention of a state of captivity or ‘God-forgetfulness’ in the introductory sections of his Christian Faith (see CF, §11.2) occurs in the broader discussion of redemption. 10 KGA I.13.1, §62.3, p. 393; CF, p. 261. On the ‘great opposition’ between sin and grace in Christian consciousness, see also Schleiermacher, Christliche Sittenlehre (Vorlesung im Wintersemester 1826/27), pp. 95–8, 105–6. 11 KGA I.13.1, §63, pp. 394–5, emphasis original in text; CF, p. 262. Gerrish, ‘The Atoning Life of Christ’, pp. 220–2. 9



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The Germ of Sin This close interconnection of sin and grace frustrates any speculative attempt to isolate the first origin of sin. Sin has no independent or ‘self-contained existence’ (ein abgeschlossenes Daseins), nor is it ‘a self-contained process’ (einen abgeschlossenen Verlauf) that could be traced back to a specific historical event or natural cause.12 Accordingly, Schleiermacher finds no true explanation for the beginnings of sin in the narrative of the first pair in the Garden, since their susceptibility to the serpent’s temptation still implies some prior inclination to sinfulness. In committing this inaugural sin, he suggests, they appear rather as the ‘first born of sinfulness’ (Erstlinge der Sündigkeit), with the account of their transgression serving to illustrate overall the manner in which sin arises in all.13 Still less, he argues, can one posit the beginnings of sin in some separate or external principle, whether something within the natural world such as physical matter or a substance beyond it. Such an admission would amount to Manicheanism and would abolish the Christian conviction of the world’s original perfection in its absolute dependence upon the divine causality.14 Instead, Schleiermacher describes human living everywhere as already inescapably bound by an inward disposition and readiness to sin that exists prior to all action. Despite the original perfection of human nature, in its capacity to give rise to the consciousness of God, in concrete historical living each is also hampered by a ‘universal original sinfulness’ (allgemeinen ursprünglichen Sündhaftigkeit), and ‘an incapacity for the good’ (eine Unfähigkeit zum Guten) that exists as ‘the general state of the human being’.15 This state of sin, as prior to the awakening of consciousness of God and communication of grace, is not itself the proper object of the divine will but manifests a distortion or ‘derangement’ (Störung) of human nature and human development. Schleiermacher describes this disordered condition through the traditional biblical language of the conflict of flesh and spirit.16 In the slow progression of conscious human life, the lower sensory functions do not KGA I.13.1, §81.1, p. 495; CF, p. 331. KGA I.13.1, §72.4, p. 449; CF, p. 299. See also §72.5. 14 See CF, §§80–2, §§59–61. 15 KGA I.13.1, §71.4, §72.5, pp. 435, 452; CF, pp. 290, 301. Because of this universality of sin in historical human living, many interpreters have mistakenly claimed that Schleiermacher naturalizes sin, making it a necessary stage of human development. See, for example, H. R. Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), pp. 83–5; and Thomas Pröpper, ‘Schleiermachers Bestimmung des Christentums und der Erlösung’, Theologische Quarterschrift 168 (1988): 193–214. 16 KGA I.13.1, §68, p. 412; CF, p. 275. 12 13

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advance in uniform harmony with the higher spiritual consciousness by which one becomes aware of the dependence upon God but develop irregularly to form a habitual and relatively independent hindrance to these higher impulses. Thus, over against the expanding power of the human spirit and the budding awareness of God is the stubborn and recalcitrant activity of the flesh. This independent activity becomes in each a germ or ‘a living seed (Keim) of sin’, which constrains the growth of the consciousness of God and expresses an active resistance as soon as it is aroused by outward temptation.17 In this sense, the rise of sin has an epiphenomenal quality in Schleiermacher’s thought; it marks an aberrant yet inescapable consequence of the always still incomplete dominion of the spirit over the flesh in historical human living.18 Importantly, however, this universal tendency to sin is not simply linked to individual development but ingrained in social living as it has unfolded over countless generations. The reign of sin, for Schleiermacher, is mediated historically. Each individual is born into an already-existing deformation of human social life, and the sinful condition of each has its roots in something ‘prior to his own existence’.19 Sin is at once cemented in one’s own action and anchored in something extending well beyond the individual life. In this fashion, the workings of sin have become a fixed element in the historical development of human beings, a distorted condition but one that is universally inherited and appropriated as one’s own. As a result, the sway of sin does not merely concern the wayward dispositions or activities of single individuals but the reciprocal and communal life of human beings in its entirety: it is ‘in each the work of all and in all the work of each’.20 This collective dimension of human sinfulness requires significant re-imagining of the traditional categories of original and actual, or personal, sin.

Original Sin Schleiermacher presents original sin (Erbsünde) as ‘the collective act (Gesamttat) and collective guilt (Gesamtschuld) of the human race’.21 The designation of this underlying sinfulness as ‘original’ (Erb-) highlights its inherited (erblich) KGA I.13.1, §66.1, p. 406; CF, p. 272. See CF, §81. 19 KGA I.13.1, §69.1, p. 418; CF, p. 279. 20 KGA I.13.1, §71.2, p. 431; CF, p. 288. 21 KGA I.13.1, §71, p. 427; CF, 285. 17 18



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character, as the lives of those in later generations remain imprinted and conditioned by the communal action of those who have gone before. Taken in this sense, original sin is ‘something received (ein empfangenes) and brought along (mitgebrachtes) prior to all action’.22 It indicates the persisting sinfulness of the acting subject, which precedes all specific activities as a ‘complete incapacity’ (vollkommene Unfähigkeit) for the good.23 In accord with earlier formulations of original sin, this universal sinfulness for Schleiermacher has no strict or precise beginning in an individual’s life but is a diseased condition present in every human being from the first. This ‘congenital sinfulness’ (mitgeborene Sündhaftigkeit) moreover does not merely confer an inborn propensity towards future sin but carries within itself a kind of concealed or latent guilt that is present even before an opportunity arises to break forth in actual sin.24 It is the active and ‘sufficient ground’ (hinreichender Grund) of all particular sins in the individual, so that what is needed for the actual expression of sin is only the presence of a suitable outward occasion rather than any kind of inward change. Such a corrupted condition forms the persistent inward ground of sinful activities, from which actual sins unfailingly proceed. And as the exercise of sin increases and acquires the momentum and force of habit, one falls prey to sin ‘almost irresistibly’, bringing forth and multiplying further sin in oneself and others.25 Thus everywhere, ‘wherever human living is’, the force of sin operates as an active inward principle of human life, so that it can be said even of young children or the newly born that each will become a sinner through what is already within. Given the time and occasion, each repeats Adam’s fall.26 Because of its inherent ‘collectivity’ (Gemeinsamkeit), however, original sin finds its genuine form not in the condition of separate individuals but in the interconnected life of the community.27 Though taking shape differently in each, the form of sin in an individual is not explicable simply through itself but only as it is complemented by sin in others, as a component part of the broader sinfulness reigning in one’s sphere of life (Lebenskreis). This interdependence of sin, as a ‘collective power of the flesh’ (Gesamtkraft des Fleisches), finds differing modes of expression throughout the various gradations of community – in KGA I.13.1, §69.p.s, p. 420; CF, p. 281. KGA I.13.1, §70, p. 421; CF, p. 282. KGA I.13.1, §71.1, p. 428; CF, p. 286. 25 See Schleiermacher’s 1832 sermon ‘Christ Is Like Us in All Things But Sin’, in Schleiermacher: Christmas Dialogue, The Second Speech, and Other Selections, ed. and trans. Julia A. Lamm (New York: Paulist Press, 2014), p. 244; and CF, §71.1. 26 KGA I.13.1, §71.1, p. 430; CF, p. 287. 27 KGA I.13.1, §71.2, p. 431; CF, p. 288. 22 23 24

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family, class, race, and nation – and is furthermore stamped by the interaction and development of groups over generations. In this regard, the sin of each individual is representative of that of larger communities and ultimately of the whole human race: ‘the sinfulness of each points back to the entire sinfulness of all.’28 For Schleiermacher, this universal tendency to sin can be fitting designated by many of the descriptions and metaphors offered up in the creeds, such as ‘original disease’, ‘original corruption’ and ‘original defect’.29 Yet properly understood it signals the collective resistance to the higher life and the longing for redemption that everywhere accompanies historical human living.

Actual Sin and the Persistence of Evil Schleiermacher’s discussions of actual sin and evil follow closely upon this understanding of original sin. Actual sin arises as the manifestation of the universal sinfulness received and brought along in original sin in the individual’s own deeds, and it comprises those emerging modes of action within the subject that arrest the higher consciousness of God as ‘veritable sin’.30 Just as the distorted condition of original sin, the expression of such actual sin is universal in scope and is invariably present in human living. Indeed, Schleiermacher explains, it is the nature of this inborn tendency to sin that it is constantly issuing forth in action: ‘[i]n all human beings, actual sin is always proceeding from original sin.’31 Accordingly, sinfulness is not only continuously present in all human conditions but always in some measure operative in all human action, so that in ‘the entire range of sinful humanity’, from which Christ alone is excepted, one finds no pure act or moment in which there does not exist some ‘secret opposition (Widerspruch) to the consciousness of God’.32 In this respect, the actual performance of sin represents no new element in human living but is the ‘consequence of something already long enduring’.33 Even in those moments of victory over sin or temptation, Schleiermacher notes in a later sermon, there still remains a ‘dark spot … on the innermost ground of the soul’ in those inward motions and preparations that form the early stirrings KGA I.13.1, §71.2, p. 432; CF, p. 288. See CF, §71.2; §71.4. 30 KGA I.13.1, §69.3, p. 419; CF, p. 281. 31 KGA I.13.1, §73, p. 457; CF, p. 304. 32 KGA I.13.1, §73.1, p. 458; CF, p. 305. 33 Schleiermacher, ‘Christ Is Like Us in All Things But Sin’, 243. 28 29



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of actual sin.34 Actual sin is already at work in the internal thoughts and desires that await an outward opportunity, and Schleiermacher cautions that none should regard themselves as immune to particular sinful acts. On the contrary, if one is attentive, each discerns within the ‘seeds of all evil’ (Keime von allem Bösem), which could spring forth in specific deeds if provided with a strong enough incentive.35 With this description of actual sin as the unfailing expression of the universal sinfulness in human living, Schleiermacher departs from many of the traditional classifications of sins. While acknowledging that some actions exhibit a greater strength of sin, he sets aside many of the more customary divisions, such as the arrangement of sins according to concupiscent desire and idolatrous error, or distinctions between sins that are inward or outward, intentional or unintentional, and mortal or venial. The only essential distinction, for Schleiermacher, concerns the relation to redemption, according to which the power of sin is either increasing or passing away in human living. Among those who have been brought into a lasting connection with the power of the redemption, and are thus in a state of grace, the sway of sin appears as gradually diminishing or decreasing. Here, actual sin no longer exercises its infectious power to originate or bring forth further sin in oneself and others. The sins that remain arise only as a kind of ‘shadow of sin’ (Schatten der Sünde), not as something willed but as an unwanted aftereffect of a deep-seated ‘force of habit’.36 In those beyond the sphere of redemption, by contrast, the influence of sin remains predominant, and actual sin continues to increase and multiply sins and sinfulness in themselves and others, firmly entrenching the ‘contaminated (verunreinigte) consciousness of God’.37 Furthermore, apart from redemption the force of sin also thwarts spiritual progress in other areas of human action, such as political or civic life, or the advance of science or art. In this action of those standing outside the living connection to Christ, then, there exists only a ‘shadow of the good’ (Schatten des Guten) – sometimes stronger or weaker – that dimly anticipates freedom from the ongoing conflict with the flesh.38 It is in view of this universality of sin and the inevitability of its expression in historical living that Schleiermacher takes up the connection of sin and evil and the contested question of divine punishment. The link between sin and evil Ibid. KGA I.13.1, §73.2, p. 460; CF, p. 306. 36 KGA I.13.1, §74.4, p. 470; CF, p. 314. 37 KGA I.13.1, §74.4, p. 469; CF, p. 313. 38 KGA I.13.1, §74.4, p. 470; CF, p. 314. See also Schleiermacher, Christliche Sittenlehre (Vorlesung im Wintersemester 1826/27), pp. 188–224, 443–80. 34 35

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marks for Schleiermacher an intrinsic feature of distinctively Christian piety, and forms an indispensable corollary to the teachings of original and actual sin. Yet of itself the category of evil does not belong to the original constitution of the world, nor does it precede sin such that the prior existence of evil gives rise to sin in human beings. Maintaining such a position, Schleiermacher argues, requires one to assign sin a source entirely outside and independent of human activity, either in a separate Manichean principle or in an original divine decree that ordained the place of evil within the natural world. Instead, he argues, the relation is reversed: ‘sin is at first everywhere what is primary and original, and evil derivative and secondary.’39 That evil occurs in the world is only the consequence of sin, and its proper foundation is not found in the natural arrangement of the created world but in human freedom and action. Through this portrayal of the link between sin and evil, Schleiermacher significantly reframes the question of evil’s role in the world. He describes the evils encountered in human living – causes of the various ‘repressions of life’ (Lebenshemmungen) – as resulting from sin in two senses. On one hand, evils emerge not through any change in the world or outward circumstance, but because ‘the world appears otherwise to the human being than it would have without sin’.40 Those sensory and bodily aspects of life that in themselves are not fundamentally opposed to the consciousness of God – such as weakness, scarcity, disease, or even bodily death – are now experienced as miseries that everywhere beset and torment human life. In the light of sin, these unavoidable hindrances to life are reckoned as ‘natural evil’ (natürliches Übel), common to all even apart from particular human activities. On the other hand, however, is the further class of troubles and sorrows in life that proceed expressly from human actions. Such ‘social evil’ (geselliges Übel) arises from the conflict and opposition between human beings, and the myriad ways in which single individuals and larger communities hinder, oppress and struggle against others while seeking private gain.41 These social injustices not only yield immediate effects, but exercise an ongoing impact upon future generations, shaping social structures, traditions and institutions. For this reason, Schleiermacher contends, apart from sin nothing in the transitoriness of human life or the finitude of the natural world could rightly be considered an evil. Once given the presence of sin, however, the growth of evil KGA I.13.1, §76.1, p. 476; CF, p. 318. KGA I.13.1, §75.1, p. 473; CF, p. 316. KGA I.13.1, §75.2, pp. 473–74; CF, pp. 316–17. In this connection, see also Schleiermacher’s discussion of animosity towards those perceived as outside one’s group (CF §70.3).

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in the world inevitably follows: ‘evil arises first with sin, but with sin it arises without fail.’42 Accordingly, when considering the question of the affliction of evils as punishment for sin, Schleiermacher rejects the position that would ascribe to God the role of meting out specific punishments for offences against divine justice. While all evil, when viewed in its connection with divine causality, ‘is to be regarded as punishment (Strafe) for sin’, it represents such a penalty only in the limited sense of the persisting connection between sin and evil: evil enters the world as the byproduct and consequence of human sin.43 Social evils exhibit this punishment for sin directly, through the expanding and deepening ‘deterioration of the world’ (Verschlimmerung der Welt) that follows in the wake of communal human sin.44 Natural evils, by contrast, reflect such punishment only indirectly, as it is only through sin that natural imperfections, pains, and hindrances of finite existence are experienced as evil. In no case, then, can one regard evils as punishment for a single individual’s sin. Rather, evil is the ‘collective penalty’ (Gesamtstrafe) consequent to the collective guilt (Gesamtschuld) of sin.45 We each suffer for the sins of others.

The Author of Sin and Redemption This novel conception of sin and evil leads to a notably revised understanding of the place of sin in the created order, and carries significant implications for the divine attributes of holiness and justice. Recognizing no clean distinction between permission and causation in the absolute and unified divine causality, Schleiermacher affirms that ‘everything real without exception’ and all that happens is wholly dependent upon God.46 Consequently, though neither sin in itself nor ‘evil as such’ are ordained by God, since neither can exist in isolation, still he holds that ‘sin must in some way subsist through the divine causality, and that in relation to this subsistence of sin (Bestehen der Sünde) this divine KGA I.13.1, §75.1, p. 473; CF, p. 316. KGA I.13.1, §76, p. 475; CF, p. 317. 44 KGA I.13.1, §76.3, p. 479; CF, p. 320. For a discussion of Schleiermacher’s position on social sin and evil as anticipating more recent social criticism in theology, see Rick Elgendy, ‘Reconsidering Resurrection, Incarnation, and Nature in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 15 (3) (2013): 302, 311–13; and cf. Derek R. Nelson’s summary of Ritschl’s critique of Schleiermacher in What’s Wrong With Sin? Sin in Individual and Social Perspective from Schleiermacher to Theologies of Liberation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 15–48. 45 KGA I.13.1, §84.2, p. 521; CF, p. 348. 46 KGA I.13.1, §48.3, p. 293; CF, p. 188. 42 43

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causality must be determined in a particular way’.47 While one might rightly claim that sin has its source in human freedom, insofar as it truly exists it must also in some measure be rooted in the eternal divine decree. In clear contrast to the language of the creeds, Schleiermacher thereby maintains that God must be acknowledged in some sense as the ‘author (Urheber) of sin’.48 Yet at the same time he insists that this dependence of sin upon the eternal divine causality can only be understood in a specific and limited sense. God cannot be regarded the author of sin in the same measure that God is author of redemption, for the existence of sin alongside grace is ordained by God only in its relation to redemption. The perennial presence of sin in human existence, and the fact that the imperfect triumph of the spirit over the flesh becomes sin to us, is ‘ordained by God as that which makes redemption necessary’.49 In respect to the existence of sin and evil, then, Schleiermacher proffers a unique form of supralapsarianism: God does not will redemption in response to sin but everything in the created order – including human nature in its precarious susceptibility to deformation – is arranged with a view towards redemption through Christ.50 Within this scheme, the traditional attributes of divine holiness and justice take on fresh meaning. God’s holiness does not refer to a static divine purity set apart from sin and redemption. It reflects the expression of conscience (Gewissen) in human living, which recognizes deviations from the promptings of the consciousness of God as sin and constitutes an awareness of one’s incapacity to do what is good or pleasing to God. Such conscience is the source of all moral law, and hence is the fount of the civil laws that govern society. Yet conscience itself does not find fulfilment in the works of law but more sharply illuminates the need for redemption, as an apprehension of the state of sin that is to be abolished.51 KGA I.13.1, §79.1, p. 473; CF, p. 324; see also §81.1. KGA I.13.1, §79, p. 486; CF, p. 325. On God as ‘author’ of sin, see also Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Doctrine of Election: With Special Reference to the Aphorisms of Dr. Bretschneider, trans. Iain G. Nichol and Allen G. Jorgenson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press), pp. 67–73; Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-Theological Comparison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 63–7. 49 KGA I.13.1, §81.3, pp. 501–2; CF, p. 335. 50 See KGA I.13.2, §164.1, pp. 494–5: ‘In the Christian belief that everything has been created for the sake of the redemption (daß alles zu dem Erlösung geschaffen ist), on the contrary, it is laid down that already through creation everything is arranged in advance and retrospectively with regard to the revelation of God in the flesh and to the most complete possible transmission of this revelation to the entire human nature, for the sake of the formation of the Reign of God.’ On Schleiermacher’s distinctive brand of supralapsarianism, see also Edwin van Driel, Incarnation Anyway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 9–26. 51 See CF, §83.1; and Schleiermacher, Christliche Sittenlehre (Vorlesung im Wintersemester 1826/27), p. 175, n.1; see also Schleiermacher’s 1830 sermon, ‘Evangelical Faith and the Law’, Servant of the 47 48



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Likewise, to affirm the justice of God for Schleiermacher is to recognize the ‘punishment’ of sin – the enduring connection between sin and evil – as rooted in the divine causality. Within the created order, the occurrence of evil depends upon the growth and spread of sin, such that in the measure that sin increases or decreases in the entire human race, one also finds an increase or decrease of evil in the world. Hence, divine justice indicates no demand for retribution or satisfaction of God’s ‘wrath’ – a notion belonging to an inferior stage of spiritual development in which ‘the Deity is still thought of as susceptible to irritation, and as not above feeling an offense’.52 Instead, the ‘omnipresent and eternal divine justice’ concerns the relation of the divine ordering of the world to human freedom and the ubiquity of sin.53 It refers to collective human living as still suffering under sin and awaiting redemption through Christ, in whose work the connection between sin and evil is dissolved. In this respect, then, both the holiness and the justice of God can be fully understood ‘only in relation to the domain of redemption’.54 The fact of redemption, Schleiermacher insists, is ‘that to which everything is referred’.55

Redemption and Reconciliation As this brief summary makes clear, Schleiermacher’s treatment of sin is distinguished throughout by its focus on the inherently social dimension of sin and evil. This emphasis marks an original and promising feature of his treatment of sin, and highlights an area of significant and continuing influence in modern theology.56 Yet this attention to the collective character of sin also underscores the close integration of sin and redemption in his thought, and it sheds light upon the unique character of redemption in his theological writings. Because

54 55 56 52 53

Word: Selected Sermons of Friedrich Schleiermacher, trans. Dawn DeVries (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), pp. 136–45. KGA I.13.1, §84.3, p. 524; CF, p. 350. KGA I.13.1, §84.3, p. 527; CF, p. 352. KGA I.13.1, §84.3, p. 525; CF, p. 351. KGA I.13.1, §84.4, p. 525; CF, p. 351. See Walter Rauschenbusch’s positive appraisal of Schleiermacher’s contribution in A Theology for the Social Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), pp. 27, 92–3; Elizabeth HinsonHasty, ‘“In Each the Work of All, and in All the Work of Each”: Sin and Salvation in Schleiermacher and Rauschenbusch’, in Schleiermacher’s Influences on American Thought and Religious Life, vol. 1, pp. 379–86, 389–92; Wyman, ‘Rethinking the Christian Doctrine of Sin’, pp. 213–17. See also Richard E. Crouter’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s ongoing engagement with Schleiermacher’s writings on sin and repentance in ‘Schleiermacher: Revisiting Kierkegaard’s Relationship to Him’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, vol. 2, ed. Jon Stewart (London: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 215–18.

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of its universality, the general condition of human sinfulness is not overcome through isolated actions of individuals and discrete communities. Although inspired instances of human goodness or spiritual insight may allow intermittent experiences of illumination and glimpses of the higher life, the force of sin in collective human living situation requires a deeper and more fundamental change. Just as ‘sin is essentially something communal’, so too the transforming and liberating work of the Redeemer must extend to all: ‘redemption through Christ is ordained for the entire human race.’57 This accent on the pervasiveness and ubiquity of sin places Schleiermacher’s account at a significant remove from Pelagian or Socinian positions, which would obviate the need for redemption or reduce the importance of Christ’s work to a moral sacrifice worthy of imitation. Thus, although he speaks of the archetype or ‘ideal’ (das Urbild) in Christ, still this is clearly distinguished from any merely exemplary dignity (vorbildliche Würde). Christ is set apart from all others through the absolute perfection and strength of his consciousness of God, which was ‘an actual existence (eigentliches Sein) of God in him’.58 And his unique activity does not simply consist of noble teaching or moral example but yields a new and higher form of living, incorporating believers into the fellowship and blessedness of his life.59 However, Schleiermacher also rejects those views of redemption that would posit Christ’s influence as operating outside the given conditions of the historical and natural world. The language of Christ’s victory over sin as the defeat of evil powers or the triumph of divine command or fiat finds little place in his system.60 Neither does he accept the ‘magical’ (magische) view, by which Christ’s work exercises a direct personal influence that would reach an individual apart from the life of a community, and so independently of any historical or natural mediation.61 Instead, redemption signals a gradual but decisive transformation of human historical living through the transition from the collective life of sin to the corporate life of grace. The alienation of sin can only be overcome through a higher liberating and redemptive influence that can break the power and inevitability of sin, and this is provided by the new communal life of grace founded in Christ and continuing in the church through the Holy Spirit. KGA I.13.1, §78.3, §83.2, pp. 485, 513; CF, p. 324, 343. KGA I.13.2, §94, p. 52; CF, p. 385. 59 See CF, §§100–1. 60 Cf. CF, §104.4. 61 See CF, §100.3, §101.3. 57 58



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Furthermore, Christ’s activity brings not only release from the force and constraint of sin but also reconciliation (Versöhnung), sundering the connection between sin and evil. While pain and suffering remain as the result of continuing natural and social hindrances to life, in the life of grace these no longer arrest the consciousness of God nor arise as evils but instead serve to better indicate the path of faithful obedience. Christ’s work sets believers free from the misery (Unseligkeit) of sin and gathers them into his own ‘unclouded blessedness’ (Seligkeit).62 The scandal of the cross, as the ‘greatest moment in the work of redemption’, finds its proper place within this divine redemptive activity as a whole.63 The reconciling or atoning death (versöhnenden Tod) of Christ exhibits a perfect sympathy for humanity’s weakness and a willingness to suffer the punishment and evil that follows sin. This ‘absolutely self-denying love’ reveals with the most complete vividness the manner in which God was in Christ to reconcile the world to himself.64 In this fashion, Schleiermacher’s doctrine of sin, like his treatment of grace, displays a thoroughly Christocentric character. It looks forward to the ‘total spiritual miracle’ of the appearance of the Redeemer and the reign of God in human history.65 Christ’s entrance into humanity marks ‘the second creation’ (die zweite Schöpfung), the regeneration of the human race by which it becomes ‘a new creature’ (eine neue Kreatur).66 More precisely, Christ’s appearance and founding of this new corporate life marks the ‘completed creation (vollendete Schöpfung) of human nature’.67 This emergence of the Redeemer cannot be explained on the basis of what came before, in the collective life of sin, but is a new and unique creation of the eternal divine decree. In Christ, the supernatural becomes natural, as his originative divine influence operates in and through the historical world to transform it from within.68 Indeed, for Schleiermacher, it is only through this fellowship with Christ that the nature of sin can be known. We recognize the fault of the old Adam only through the perfection of the new.69 KGA I.13.2, §101, p. 112; CF, p. 431. KGA I.13.2, §104.4, p. 140; CF, p. 458. 64 KGA I.13.2, §104.4, p. 142; CF, p. 458. See also Schleiermacher, ‘Christ Is Like Us in All Things But Sin’, pp. 246–9. 65 KGA I.13.2, §103.4, p. 131; CF, p. 449; see also §99. 66 KGA I.13.2, §106.2, p. 166; CF, p. 477. 67 KGA I.13.2, §89, p. 28; CF, p. 366. See also Schleiermacher, On the Doctrine of Election, pp. 60–7. 68 See CF, §88.4, §94.3, §100.3. On the theme of the supernatural-becoming-natural in Schleiermacher’s theology, see Vander Schel, Embedded Grace, pp. 8–11, 83–6, 176–9. 69 See CF, §61.5, §95.3. 62 63

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Conclusion: The Passing Reign of Sin In its relation to earlier Protestant treatments, Schleiermacher’s doctrine of sin occupies a clearly critical and mediating position. On one hand, certain traditional elements of the doctrine of sin retain a central place in his presentation. His discussion of sin consistently opposes the tendency to Pelagianism, and it accentuates the universality of sin and the inevitability of its expression in the activities of individuals and communities. One and all, human beings can never refrain from sin: ‘sin creeps into everything’.70 On the other, his treatment significantly de-emphasizes or displaces many familiar aspects of the church’s teaching on sin. Thus despite his insistence on the pervasiveness of sin, Schleiermacher departs from major themes in the Augustinian views of late medieval and Reformation theologians. The notion of a historical fall from original perfection plays no constitutive role in his thought, and the focus on appeasing divine wrath, as he describes in an 1830 sermon, can only be regarded as a departure from ‘the true spirit of Christianity’ that has no place in Christian doctrine.71 Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith thereby presents a significant reinterpretation of sin. Throughout, his treatment outlines sin’s inherently social character. Human sinfulness – as universal original condition, as actuated in deed, and as bringing forth the ‘punishment’ of evil – emerges everywhere as a collective distortion of human living. Yet above all, his discussion foregrounds the inseparability of the reality of sin from the ongoing work of redemption. As ‘all human beings have drifted away from God’, Christ has entered into fellowship with sinners, and assumes them into the power of his new corporate life.72 This refashioned understanding of sin suggests both the promise and the challenge of Schleiermacher’s theological programme, and it marks an important voice in the ongoing task of retrieving and clarifying the central doctrine of sin in modern theology.

KGA I.13.2, §98.1, pp. 90–1; CF, p. 414. See Schleiermacher’s 1830 sermon, ‘The Wrath of God’, in Servant of the Word, pp. 152–3. 72 Schleiermacher, ‘Christ is Like Us in All Things But Sin’, p. 248. 70 71

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Søren Kierkegaard Sylvia Walsh

The primary contribution of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) to a modern understanding of the Christian doctrine of sin consists in his psychological analysis of the concept of anxiety as the precondition and consequence of original or hereditary sin in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) and the concept of despair as constituting the universal sickness of sin as well as the first element of faith in The Sickness unto Death (1848). Although these two works were issued pseudonymously, the first by Vigilius Haufniensis (Watchman of Copenhagen) and the second by Anti-Climacus, a Christian diagnostician, Kierkegaard originally planned to publish both works under his own name. Thus they can be regarded as reflecting his own views, not merely those of the pseudonyms. Out of deference to his request that the pseudonyms be allowed to speak for themselves, however, we shall refer to them as the authors of these works in the following analysis of sin in his authorship.1

Part I: Anxiety as the Precondition and Consequence of Original or Hereditary Sin Brought up in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark and trained theologically in the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition, Kierkegaard generally accepted the official doctrines of the Lutheran Church as stated in the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the Smalcald Articles of 1537 and the Formula of Concord in 1577, although the last-named document was never formally adopted by the Danish Lutheran

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, vol. 1, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 625–30.

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Church.2 With respect to the Augustinian-Lutheran doctrine of hereditary sin, however, Kierkegaard found the interpretations of both the Catholic and Protestant traditions to be problematic in several respects, leading some commentators to contend that he rejected it altogether.3 But Kierkegaard clearly agreed with the teaching of the Lutheran tradition concerning the deep corruption of sin in human nature, calling the Augsburg Confession ‘masterly’ in its declaration of the need for divine revelation to inform the human understanding of the universality and pervasive corruption of this condition.4 Nor did he reject the notion of hereditary sin altogether; on the contrary, in The Concept of Anxiety Vigilius Haufniensis seeks to carve out a middle course between Augustine and Pelagius, affirming corporate solidarity of the race with Adam without making hereditary sin involuntary and preserving individual responsibility for sin without falling into the isolated individualism of Pelagianism.5 Through a psychological treatment of the concept of anxiety that ‘constantly keeps in mente [in mind] and before its eye’ the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin, he seeks to point Christian dogmatics toward a more accurate account of hereditary sin in accordance with the Genesis story, which in his view is not a myth but ‘the only dialectically consistent view’ of sin.6

The Relation of Original Sin to Hereditary Sin Historically and dogmatically, original sin (peccatum originale originans) is Lee C. Barrett, ‘Kierkegaard’s “Anxiety” and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety, (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), p. 43. 3 Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ‘The Interpretation of Hereditary Sin in The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard’s Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis’, Tijdschrift voor Filosophie, 72 (2010), p. 131. Roger Poole, ‘“Dizziness, Falling … Oh (dear)! …” Reading Begrebet Angest for the very first Time’, in N. J. Cappelørn et al. (eds), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), pp. 211–13; John J. Davenport, ‘“Entangled Freedom”: Ethical Authority, Original Sin, and Choice in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety’, Kierkegaardiana 21 (2000): 132; Gregory R. Beabout, Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1996), p. 39; Niels Thulstrup, ‘Adam and Original Sin’, in Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová (eds), Theological Concepts in Kierkegaard, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana 5 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel, 1980), p. 153. 4 Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 4, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.), (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967–78), nos. 4035, 4038. 5 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, Reidar Thomte (ed and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28, 34, 37, 186; Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), p. 230; Kieregaard: Thinking Christianity in an Existential Mode (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 86–7, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009), pp. 86–7. Philip L. Quinn, ‘Does Anxiety Explain Original Sin?’, Noȗs 24 (1990): 242. 6 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 14, 32. 2



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equated with Adam’s first sin as the cause of sin in distinction from hereditary sin (peccatum originale originatum) as the sinfulness of later generations inherited through propagation.7 In the Augsburg Confession and Smaldkald Articles, however, Luther equates the two, identifying original sin (Ursünde in German) with hereditary sin (Erbsünde in German; arvesynd in Danish) as the state of sinfulness into which all human beings are born since the fall of Adam, in accordance with Psalm 51.5.8 It is this conflation of original sin and hereditary sin that Haufniensis queries in The Concept of Anxiety, asking: ‘Is the concept of hereditary sin identical with the concept of the first sin, Adam’s sin, the Fall of humankind?’9 Stated more precisely, ‘Does the concept of hereditary sin differ from the concept of the first sin in such a way that the particular individual participates in inherited sin only through his relation to Adam and not through his primitive relation to sin?’10 Traditionally, the difference between Adam’s first sin and that of every other human being is that ‘Adam’s sin conditions sinfulness as a consequence,’ whereas the first sin of later generations presupposes sinfulness as a state or matter of necessity, which in Haufniensis’ view severely compromises individual freedom, responsibility, and culpability for hereditary sin.11 It also has the unfortunate effect of placing Adam fantastically outside of history as the only human being in whom hereditary sin was not found, thereby excluding him from Christ’s atonement for hereditary sin. As Haufniensis sees it, ‘The problem is always that of getting Adam included as a member of the race, and precisely in the same sense in which every other individual is included. This is something to which dogmatics should pay attemtion, especially for the sake of the Atonement.’12

Unum noris, omnes The way Haufniensis goes about resolving this dogmatic issue is to establish first of all what a human being essentially is, namely an individuum or single individual who is ‘simultaneously himself and the whole race, and in such a way that the whole race participates in the individual and the individual in the Ibid., p. 27. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press., 2000), pp. 36–8, 310–11; Cappelørn, ‘The Interpretation of Hereditary Sin’, p. 132. 9 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 25, translation modified. 10 Ibid., p. 26. 11 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 12 Ibid., p. 33n. 7 8

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whole race’.13 This paradoxical concept has its antecedent in a Latin aphorism by the Roman dramatist Terence (c. 190–159 bce) cited by Haufniensis in a passage excised from the final text: ‘it is important to maintain with profound psychological decisiveness: unum noris, omnes [if you know one, you know all]. When the possibility of sin appears in one human being, it has appeared in all.’14 As Haufniensis sees it, this expression is synonymous with the Greek dictum, ‘know thyself ’, where to be a self means to posit the universal as the particular, or ‘the one that is actually all’, on the assumption that every human being possesses that which belongs essentially to being a human being.15 On the basis of this anthropological principle, ‘that which explains Adam also explains the race and vice versa’.16 Adam is neither essentially different from nor identical to the race, and the same holds true for every subsequent individual as well. Just as sin came into the world through the first sin of Adam, it appears in every subsequent individual in the same way, namely through each individual’s own first sin, which is neither greater nor lesser than Adam’s first sin nor caused by it. With the appearance of the first sin in a human being, be it Adam or a subsequent individual, a new quality is introduced, making it not merely a sin or one sin among others but the sin, which enters the world enigmatically by way of a qualitative leap or sudden change, not via a gradual quantitative progression as proposed by Hegel and his followers, against whom much of Haufniensis’ argument is directed on this matter.17

Explaining the Enigma of Sin As Haufniensis sees it, the question of why sin occurs is and remains inexplicable to the human understanding. The actuality of sin is not a subject that can be dealt with properly by any science or scholarly discipline, which seeks to provide a rational explanation of its subject matter from a disinterested, objective standpoint. Rather, the actuality of sin belongs to the sermon or art of preaching, which seeks to overcome sin in the individual through an inward appropriation of the gospel message, not by annulling it conceptually through Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 183, translation modified. 15 Ibid., pp. 78–9n. Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 3, no. 3327. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, pp. 353, 356, 571–2. 16 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 29, 79n, 183, 240–1, n. 50. Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 3, no. 3327. 17 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 30. 13 14



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a rational explanation. While ethics might seem to be an appropriate discipline for explaining the actuality of sin, its goal is to bring ideality into existence on the assumption that every human being has the capacity to achieve the moral ideal. Far from being able to explain the actuality of sin, then, ethics becomes ‘shipwrecked’ on this phenomenon, which shows itself to be deeply embedded in actuality as a ‘presupposition that goes beyond the individual to include the whole human race’.18 Dogmatics, by contrast, presupposes the actuality of sin but explains it by presupposing hereditary sin or sinfulness in the race as the conceptual possibility of sin. As Haufniensis sees it, however, sin is not presupposed by a prior or innate state of sinfulness as suggested, for example, by Schleiermacher.19 Rather, sin presupposes itself and thus is prior to sinfulness, which ‘is in the world only insofar as it comes into the world by sin’, which enters the world enigmatically by way of a qualitative leap.20 Explaining the actuality of sin is also beyond the domain of psychology, a scholarly discipline whose subject is the human psyche. But as Haufniensis sees it, psychology can explain the real possibility of sin, that is, not why sin comes into existence but how it appears. The kind of psychology he has in mind, however, is not empirical psychology as that discipline is generally practised today. Rather, Haufniensis claims ‘psychological-poetic authority’ for his deliberations by virtue of the ‘poetic originality’ with which they are based on observations drawn ‘entirely fresh from the water’, as it were, by taking note of ‘every mood, every psychic state’ in himself and others.21 Echoing Kant’s quotation from Horace, Mutato nomine de te fibula (Change but the name, of you the tale is told), in confirmation of the biblical claim that ‘in Adam we have all sinned’ (Rom. 5.12), he observes: ‘If the explanation of Adam and his fall does not concern me as a fibula, quae de me narrator (story that speaks to me), one might as well forget both Adam and the explanation.’22 Adam’s story, then, is our story as single individuals, which is perhaps the most important point to be gleaned from Haufniensis’ psychological observations, as indicated in the following statement:

Ibid., pp. 17, 19. Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode, p. 81. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (eds) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), pp. 293–301; Walsh, ‘On “Feminine” and “Masculine” Forms of Despair’, p. 88; Matthew J. Frawley, ‘Human Nature and Fall in Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard’, Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 145–58; Quinn, ‘Does Anxiety Explain Original Sin?’, pp. 227–44; Beabout, Freedom and Its Misuses, pp. 117–26. 20 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 32–3. 21 Ibid., pp. 54–5. 22 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni (eds and trans.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 64; Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 186. 18 19

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How many a learned theologian has not known how to explain the teachings of the Bible, the Church, the Fathers, the Symbols of the Church, as well as those of the philosophers, on hereditary sin, without having occupied himself at any time in tracing the effect of hereditary sin in his own or another person’s consciousness? Nevertheless, this is the first thing that every human being is assigned to do, and every human being, if he carefully examines himself, possesses within himself a more complete expression for everything human than the summa summarum of all the knowledge that he gains in the above manner.23

Anxiety as the Precondition of Sin If Adam’s story is our story, how then does sin come into existence in him and in us? ‘Here as everywhere,’ Haufniensis states, ‘it is true that if one wants to maintain a dogmatic definition in our day, one must begin by forgetting what Hegel has discovered in order to help dogmatics.’24 He alludes here to the concept of innocence, which Hegel identifies with immediacy, a state that must be conceptually annulled by the mediacy of reflection. Pointing out that innocence is an ethical concept, not a logical one, Haufniensis maintains contra Hegel that innocence is lost or annulled only by guilt, which is how it was lost by Adam and continues to be lost by every individual after him. As Haufniensis sees it, the ‘correct explanation’ of innocence is the one given in Genesis, namely that innocence is ignorance, consequently a quality or state that is neither perfect nor imperfect, not to be transcended nor regained, and which ‘may very well endure’.25 Contrary to the claims of some commentators, then, Haufniensis does not endorse the notion of a felix culpa (fortunate fall), although the possibility of sin may well be a felix fragilitas (fortunate fragility) that makes faith possible.26 As Haufniensis sees it, the question of how innocence is lost can only be explained, within limits, by the science of psychology. Noting several inadequate attempts to provide a psychological explanation of the Fall by way of the Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 184–5, translation modified. Ibid., p. 35. 25 Ibid., p. 37; Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 125–7. 26 Barett, ‘Kierkegaard’s “Anxiety” and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin’, pp. 238–9; Timothy Dalrymple, ‘Adam and Eve: Human Being and Nothingness’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome I: The Old Testament (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 3–40; Jason A. Mahn, Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 53–85; Davenport, ‘Entangled Freedom’, p. 139; Barett, ‘Kierkegaard’s “Anxiety” and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin’, p. 56. 23 24



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concepts of prohibition, temptation, and concupiscence, he proposes instead to explain it retrogressively and progressively through the concept of anxiety. In his journals Kierkegaard states: ‘The nature of hereditary sin has often been explained, and still a primary category has been lacking – it is anxiety [Angst]; this is the essential determinant.’27 Noting that anxiety is a concept rarely treated in the psychology of his time and thus is ‘open for the taking’, Kierkegaard proposes to give it definite meaning as ‘a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’, which in his view is ‘altogether different from fear’ with which it was generally associated in his day.28 Whereas fear has a definite object toward which it is negatively directed, anxiety is ambiguous in that it is both attracted to and repelled by its object, which in the state of innocence is really nothing or the mere possibility of freedom, that is, a being able to do something. At this stage, however, a human being – whose essential task in existence is to actualize itself as spirit in a synthesis of mind and body, the temporal and the eternal – has no conception of what that might be since it lacks a knowledge of good and evil and has not yet become itself but exists in a dreaming state of the possibility of freedom.29 At the same time desiring yet fearing to become itself, this dreaming spirit is gripped by anxiety in the form of a foreign, hostile power that lays hold of it as it looks down into ‘the yawning abyss’ of freedom, becomes dizzy, and ‘faints’, as it were, succumbing to sin in a qualitative leap from innocence to guilt in the failure to posit itself as a synthesis and positing ‘an unwarranted actuality’ instead.30 Further than this, Haufniensis claims, psychology cannot go in explaining the movement from innocence to guilt. In becoming guilty by way of anxiety, however, the human spirit is ambiguously guilty, that is, both innocent and guilty, inasmuch as, in Haufniensis’ view, ‘the fall into sin always takes place in weakness’ or impotence, thus lacking full accountability.31

The Anxiety of Sinfulness Although Haufniensis is critical of the traditional notion of hereditary sin, he nevertheless claims that ‘the view presented in this work does not deny the propagation of sinfulness through generation, or, in other words, that sinfulness Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 1: 94. Ibid., p. 98. 29 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 44. 30 Ibid., pp. 43, 61, 113. 31 Ibid., pp. 61, 188. 27 28

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has its history through generation.’32 But he understands the propagation of sinfulness through generation differently from the Augustinian perspective inasmuch as in his view a predisposition to sin is propagated in individuals without actually causing sin in them or their progeny and thus without compromising individual responsibility for sin, which is always posited by the individual him/herself through a qualitative leap. Sinfulness after the Fall increases quantitatively in the individual and the race through sexuality, which is also posited as sinfulness as a consequence of the Fall. Although sensuousness or sexual difference is present in the human being in undifferentiated form before the Fall and thus is not sinful per se, it becomes sinful in being posited as a conscious drive in opposition to spirit as a result of sin, for if Adam had not sinned, Haufniensis claims, ‘the sexual would never have come into being as a drive’.33 A second form of anxiety is also brought into existence by sin, namely the anxiety of sinfulness or anxiety after the Fall, which takes two forms: objective anxiety or the corrupting effects of sinfulness upon nature and the social environment through the misuse of human freedom, and subjective anxiety in the individual over the continuity of sin or the possibility of sinning again.34 Haufniensis focuses primarily on subjective anxiety in individuals after Adam, beginning with Eve, who along with every other subsequent individual is a derived being and thus more imperfect, more sensuous, more reflective, more anxious and quantitatively more sinful than Adam. According to Haufniensis, this is especially true of woman, who is weaker, more sensuous, and more anxious than man, as evidenced by her physical structure, which is associated esthetically with beauty and ethically with procreation, the latter constituting the culmination of her being and the extreme point of sensuousness in the synthesis of the physical and psychical in a human being. While Haufniensis’ (and Kierkegaard’s) view of woman is subject to feminist critique, the main point he wishes to establish is that the ‘more’ or quantitative increase of anxiety in later generations gives rise to ‘a complex of presentiments’ that predispose but do not cause individuals to sin again, every repetition of which constitutes a new qualitative leap.35 Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., pp. 74, 76, 79. 34 Beabout, Freedom and Its Misuses, pp. 121–2. 35 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 61, 113; Céline Léon, The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex: Kierkegaard on Women, Sexual Difference, and Sexual Relations (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), pp. 242–53; Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 32 33



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When sin is posited in an individual, the difference between good and evil is also posited, bringing with it new anxiety in relation to the future possibility of sin, for no matter how low a person has sunk in sin, it is possible to sink even deeper.36 Anxiety about evil is potentiated to its highest point in repentance, which sorrows over sin but is unable to cancel it, since in Haufniensis’ view only the Atonement of Christ can do that.37 Anxiety about the good manifests itself in the form of the demonic or an attempt to close oneself off from the good. As Haufniensis sees it, only faith in the form of inwardness, earnestness, certitude, or subjectivity (these are all synonymous terms for him) in relation to the eternal is able to disarm anxiety so as to make it educative and salvific rather than indicative of the continuation of sin or unfreedom in an individual.38 To have faith is to have possibility in such a way as to anticipate infinity or the eternal, through which the anxieties of finitude are overcome. To be educated by anxiety thus means to be educated by possibility in such a way as to learn to be anxious in the right way, that is, so as to anticipate faith in the eternal, for as Haufniensis concludes: ‘Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’39

Part II: Despair as Sin and the First Element in Faith Unlike Vigilius Haufniensis, whose psychological observations are ‘scientific’ or objective in nature, Anti-Climacus is a Christian psychologist or ‘physician of the soul’ whose task is ‘not only to prescribe remedies but also, first and foremost, to identify the sickness’ – in this instance the sickness of despair – in order to determine whether those who are supposedly sick or healthy are actually ill or well.40 Just as some persons are sick without knowing it and others think they are healthy but are not, many individuals are in despair without being aware of it, and those who are aware of it generally have a superficial understanding Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, Jeanette B. L. Knox (trans.) (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), pp. 36–45. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 117. 38 Ibid., pp. 146–51. 39 Ibid., p. 155. 40 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 23; Merold Westphal, ‘Kierkegaard’s Psychology and Unconscious Despair’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), p. 40; C. Stephen Evans and Mark A. Tietjen, ‘Kierkegaard as a Christian Psychologist’, Journal of Psychology and Christianity 30 (2011), pp. 274–83; Simon D. Podmore, ‘Kierkegaard as Physician of the Soul: On Self-Forgiveness and Despair’, Journal of Psychology and Theology 37 (2009): 174–85. 36

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of what despair is, confusing it with ‘all sorts of transitory states’ and external causes.41 As Anti-Climacus sees it, despair is a spiritual sickness that is universal in human beings, signifying a misrelation of the human spirit to itself and to the power that establishes it as a self, namely God, regardless of whether or not it is conscious of being in despair. As such, despair is a dialectical phenomenon, that is, both an advantage and the very ruination of a human being, inasmuch as the possibility of despair signifies a human being’s superiority over the animal in being defined as spirit or a self-conscious, free being in relation to God, while the actuality of despair is utter hopelessness or ‘the sickness unto death’ if an individual does not want to be cured of it.42

Forms of Despair The basic forms of despair are distinguished in Part I of The Sickness unto Death by considering the concept of despair first of all in terms of the constituents that make up the synthesis of the human self, namely finitude and infinitude, possibility and necessity, wherein a disparity and thus despair is created by emphasizing one component to the lack or exclusion of the other. Despair is further distinguished in terms of whether it is conscious or not, which is determined by the gradations in a human being’s consciousness of being a self. According to Anti-Climacus, the most common and most dangerous form of despair is unconscious despair, in which a person is ignorant of being in despair or of having a self that is eternal or essentially related to the eternal (God). This form of despair corresponds to spiritlessness or human existence defined only by sensate or sensate-psychical categories with no conception of its being essentially spiritual in nature. Comparing a human being to a dwelling, Anti-Climacus asks us to ‘imagine a house with a basement, first floor, and second floor’ where ‘all too regrettably the sad and ludicrous truth about the majority of people is that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement’ and are indignant at the suggestion that they should move to the upper floor.43 In conscious despair, by contrast, a person is aware of being in despair and thus of having a self with something eternal in it. The more consciousness of despair, the more consciousness of self one has. In conscious despair one is thus more reflective, has a truer conception of what despair is, and possesses greater clarity Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 24. Ibid., pp. 17–18, 26. 43 Ibid., p. 43. 41 42



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about oneself as being in despair, yet one remains in despair in one of two ways, either by not willing to be oneself (despair in weakness or feminine despair) or by willing to be oneself independently of God (defiant or masculine despair). In Anti-Climacus’ view, despair in weakness is typical of but not limited to women in that they naturally tend to lose themselves in devotion to others and thus have a sense of self only in and through the object of their devotion.44 Despair in weakness manifests itself passively at the lowest level as despair over the earthly (the world in toto) or over something earthly (the particular) that is external to the self (the beloved, a job, wealth, status, etc.), which at a higher, more reflective level is understood in reality as being despair of the eternal or over oneself. According to Anti-Climacus this distinction constitutes ‘the formula for all despair’ inasmuch as ‘we despair of that which, rightly understood, releases us from despair’ and ‘over that which binds us in despair’.45 In despair in weakness at this level one is aware that ‘it is weakness to make the earthly so important’ and ‘weakness to despair’, yet one is unwilling to become oneself, electing instead to shut oneself up behind a ‘carefully closed door’ in inclosing reserve (Indesluttethed), the end result of which, if maintained, is suicide.46 In defiant or masculine despair, by contrast, one wills to become a self, but the self one wants to be rather than the self one is intended to be by God. Recognizing no power over oneself, one defiantly seeks to become one’s own master or creator in the assertion of an intensified inclosing reserve that finally becomes demonic in its hatred of and spiteful rebellion against existence.

Despair as Sin The psychological delineation of the forms of despair in Part I of The Sickness unto Death is preliminary to but crucial for the theological interpretation of despair as sin in Part II. Sin signifies a new level of despair in the form of ‘aggravated despair’ or the intensification of despair by despairingly willing or not willing to be oneself before God or with the conception of God.47 This qualification turns the discussion in a new direction inasmuch as despair is now seen as consisting not only in a misrelation to oneself but also to God, or Walsh, ‘On “Feminine” and “Masculine” Forms of Despair’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. 121–34. 45 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 60. 46 Ibid., pp. 61, 63. 47 Ibid., p. 77. 44

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more accurately, ‘the misrelation to oneself is now seen to lie in and be due to a misrelation to God’.48 Moreover, the self is now defined according to a divine measure and goal rather than a merely human conception of selfhood, gaining an infinite reality as a ‘theological self ’ or human self in likeness to God.49 By the same measure, however, the failure to become such a self constitutes sin, positing an infinite qualitative difference between the human and the divine. As Anti-Climacus sees it, all sin is committed against God, whether one is conscious of existing before the divine or not. From a theological perspective, therefore, sin is: ‘before God in despair not to will to be oneself, or before God in despair to will to be oneself.’50 In Anti-Climacus’ view, this definition accords with the scriptural view of sin as disobedience or self-willfulness against God, which ‘embraces every imaginable and every actual form of sin’, not merely sins of the flesh or ‘the glittering vices’ of the pagans, and ‘rightly stresses the crucial point that sin is despair … before God’.51 The opposite of sin, therefore, is not virtue but faith, defined as that condition in which ‘the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God’.52 According to Anti-Climacus, the Christian qualification ‘before God’ poses the possibility of offence in that ‘as an individual human being a person is directly before God’ and that person’s sin is of concern to God.53 Christianity teaches that every human being is important to God, who proposes to make every human being into something so high that it cannot be grasped by the human understanding.54 As Anti-Climacus sees it, therefore, ‘the real reason human beings are offended by Christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not humanity’s goal, because it wants to make a human being into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought’.55 Anti-Climacus specifically contrasts the Christian definition of sin to the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance, according to which there is no such thing as knowing what is right and doing wrong or knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway. Lacking a doctrine of original sin and thus a dialectical determinant for the transition from understanding to doing, the Greeks assumed that if one knows the right one will automatically do the right. Christianity, by contrast, holds Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 23. 49 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, p. 79. 50 Ibid., p. 81. 51 Ibid., p. 82. 52 Ibid., pp. 81, 131. 53 Ibid., p. 83. 54 Ibid., p. 85. 55 Ibid., p. 83, translation modified. 48



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that sin is rooted in willing rather than knowing, in consciousness rather than ignorance, and this is what most decisively differentiates it from paganism. It thus arrives at the concept of defiance as the willful refusal to understand and to do the right, to which is added the doctrine of hereditary sin explaining the deep corruption of the will and an earlier obscuring of human knowledge as being due to the fall of humanity, thus requiring a revelation from God to learn what sin is. In this sense, Anti-Climacus concedes, ‘sin is indeed ignorance’ – an ignorance of what sin is.56 With this proviso, then, the definition of sin is completed: ‘sin is – after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is – before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.’57

Sin as a Position and State Over against the pantheistic definition of sin as a negation in the form of a given condition such as weakness, sensuousness, finitude or ignorance, Anti-Climacus stands with Lutheran orthodoxy in affirming sin as a position, maintaining that, ‘when sin is defined negatively, all Christianity is flabby and spineless’.58 To say that sin is a position is to assert that it comes about by a person’s own act and fault, not through a limiting condition or lack of some kind for which the human being is not responsible. Moreover, ‘sin is a position that on its own develops an increasingly established continuity’ or consistency in evil under the power of sin so as to constitute a state of sin that is ‘wholly encompassing’ in nature.59 Every instant a person continues in the state of sin and does not take leave of it in repentance and faith constitutes a new sin, which is the state of sin itself, particular new sins being merely expressions of the continuation of the state of sin. The state of sin is greater and worse than any particular sin inasmuch as it represents a conscious intensification of sin in three forms: despair over one’s sin, despair of the forgiveness of sin, and despair of Christianity as a whole by discarding and dismissing it as untruth. The first of these forms of despair manifests itself as an intensified, demonic inclosing reserve that breaks with the good, repentance and grace, regarding Ibid., p. 96. Ibid. Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 106. 56 57 58

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them as empty and meaningless and losing oneself in selfish ambition and pride, although one may give the appearance of being so concerned about sin that one is unable to forgive oneself or claims that forgiveness from God is impossible. The second form of despair presupposes a knowledge of Christ, who constitutes the concrete criterion and goal for what it means to be a human self by virtue of ‘the inordinate concession’ of God’s having allowed himself to be born as a human being, suffer, and die for the sake of that self.60 In this form of intensified despair the basic forms of conscious despair are the opposite of what they were formerly inasmuch as the despair of weakness now becomes defiance in not willing to be or accept oneself in the category of one’s imperfection as a sinner, while despair in defiance becomes weakness in willing to be oneself as a sinner in such a way as to be irredeemable and thus beyond forgiveness. Rejection of the forgiveness of sins by Christ in either of these two ways constitutes offence at him. Just as the Jews were offended by Christ because he claimed to forgive sins, despair of the forgiveness of sins constitutes the prevailing situation in Christendom inasmuch as, according to Anti-Climacus, forgiveness is confused with a pagan peace of mind that pantheistically abolishes the infinite qualitative difference between God and a human being in both a ‘highbrow’ (speculative) and ‘lowbrow’ (common) way by abstractly focusing on the kinship of humanity with the divine rather than the actuality of sin in the individual, which is where Christianity begins and places its focus.61 Just as ‘Sin is the one and only predication about a human being that in no way, either via negationis [by denial] or via eminentiæ [by idealization], can be stated of God,’ so too ‘God is separated from a human being by the same chasmal qualitative abyss when he forgives sins’ inasmuch as for Anti-Climacus ‘there is one way in which a human being could never in all eternity come to be like God: in forgiving sins’.62 Despair of the forgiveness of sins thus constitutes ‘the most extreme concentration of offense’, which in turn is ‘the most decisive qualification’ of despair in the single individual that is possible.63 The highest intensity of despair as offence, however, occurs in sin against the Holy Spirit, in which the despairing individual goes on the offensive, attacking Christianity as ‘a lie and untruth’ and denying Christ as the paradox along with everything else that constitutes the essentially Christian.64 62 63 64 60 61

Ibid., pp. 113–14. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 122, translation modified. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., pp. 125, 131.



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Despair as the First Element in Faith Although The Sickness unto Death mainly tracks the progressive movement away from faith in the delineation of the basic forms of despair and their intensification in sin, it also indicates the way to faith inasmuch as persons who are conscious of being in despair have a greater awareness of being a self and thus are dialectically closer to being cured than those who are in despair but ignorant of it. Thus despair may also function as ‘the first element in faith’ or that which dialectically points toward faith or leads one in the direction of faith.65 For this reason Anti-Climacus declares that it is ‘the worst misfortune’ never to have had this sickness and ‘a true godsend’ to get it unless one does not wish to be cured of it, in which case it leads to perdition instead.66 But the consciousness of despair, self, God, and sin are not sufficient in and of themselves to lift a person out of despair. What is needed, Anti-Climacus suggests, is an inversion or ‘about-face’ (Omvendelse), an upheaval (Omvæltning), or metamorphosis (Metamorphose) of the will so as to become the kind of sin-consciousness that leads one to seek forgiveness and rest in Christ, namely an anguished conscience or contrite consciousness of sin in the form of a penitent heart that condemns itself in sorrow over sin.67 Only through the consciousness of sin in this form is one is admitted into Christianity and becomes a Christian.68

Contrition, Confession, Atonement and Forgiveness of Sin in Communion with Christ It is primarily in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding and communion discourses that the deep sense of guilt, shame, sorrow, repentance, and confession of sin appropriate to a contrite consciousness of sin is fleshed out.69 Kierkegaard’s Ibid., p. 116n. Ibid., p. 26. 67 Ibid., pp. 60–1n, 65, 93, 95; Walsh, Living Christianly, pp. 30–3. 68 Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 67–8, 155; Søren Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, Sylvia Walsh (trans.), (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 123. 69 Søren Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 27–36; Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 7–23, 264–88; Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 266–7; Søren Kierkegaard, Without Authority, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton 65 66

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communion discourses in particular give expression to the heartfelt longing for communion with Christ that arises from remembrance of the many atrocities committed against other human beings and Christ, the heavy burden of guilt and sin every human being bears, and the honest self-examination, self-condemnation, repentance, and confession of sin before God required for forgiveness and reconciliation to occur. Viewing Christianity as being characterized by an inverse dialectic in which one comes near to God only by recognizing how far away from the divine one stands as a sinner, Kierkegaard cites the biblical figures of the tax collector in Luke 18 and the woman who was a sinner in Luke 7 as paradigms of the appropriate penitential posture to assume before God and Christ.70 It is in these discourses, too, that his understanding of the atonement for sin by Christ is spelled out. Primarily reflecting a substitutionary theory of atonement in which the death of Christ is seen as a sacrifice that makes repayment or satisfaction for the sins of the world, Kierkegaard emphasizes our incapacity to do anything at all to atone for our sins, which only Christ can do and does in two ways, namely by taking our place and suffering the punishment for sin by his death so that we may live and by literally hiding the multitude of sins in us by covering them with his loving death.71 As Kierkegaard sees it, however, Christ’s death atones for each person individually, not for the human race in general. Thus, at Holy Communion, where the gracious forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God is pledged and assured in receiving bread and wine at the altar, it is imperative that we experience the personal presence of Christ and hear his voice, for in receiving the pledge we receive Christ himself, in whose being we now live, so that, paraphrasing St Paul, ‘you do not live yourself, no longer live yourself, but Christ lives in you’.72 For Kierkegaard, however, where Christ is, there the altar is. The task of the Christian, therefore, is to remain at the altar upon leaving it so as to make one’s daily life one of ‘divine service every day’ by living more and more out of oneself and identifying oneself with Christ and his love, which hides a multitude of sins.73 Just as Christ covers and forgives a multitude of sins by his sacrificial love and death, so too his followers are commanded to forgive their neighbours in the University Press, 1997), pp. 127–60; Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, pp. 17–19. 70 Walsh, Living Christianly, pp. 7–9; Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, pp. 100–15. 71 Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, pp. 25–30, 84–6, 99, 140–1. 72 Gal. 2:20; Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, pp. 48, 58, 143. 73 Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, pp. 60, 143.



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practice of the Christian ‘like for like’ that holds true with respect to forgiveness for Kierkegaard: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive, not the reverse, that the forgiveness you receive is the forgiveness you give … God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you … for how could a person truly believe in forgiveness if his own life is an objection against the existence of forgiveness!74

Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 380. See also Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 181–8.

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Karl Barth Paul T. Nimmo

Introduction The doctrine of sin in the theology of Karl Barth portrays the reality of human sinfulness in all its profundity and complexity. On the one hand, Barth insists upon the gravity of human opposition to God in all its varied manifestations; on the other hand, Barth contends that human sin has been vanquished in the history of Jesus Christ. The result is that Barth considers human sin to be something absurd – an ‘ontological impossibility’.1 This chapter proceeds synthetically in its presentation of Barth’s mature understanding of sin. It draws primarily on the doctrine of sin as it is presented across the three part-volumes of volume IV of his Church Dogmatics, but it also has reference to the doctrine of nothingness in volume III/3 of the same and the treatment of the powers in The Christian Life.2 In this way, it seeks to offer a systematic exposition of Barth’s doctrine. In a first section, it explores the way in which Barth writes of the knowledge Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik [hereafter indicated by KD followed by volume number, partvolume number, and page number], 4 vols in 13 parts (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1932 and Zürich: EVZ, 1938–165), vol. II/2, p. 162. All translations of KD are the author’s own. For reference, the published English translation is Church Dogmatics, 4 vols in 13 parts, edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), here citing vol. II/2, p. 136. References to page numbers in the translation will be given in parentheses following the reference in the original. A further description of sin that Barth uses is ‘impossible possibility’, KD IV/1, p. 515 (p. 463). Such phrases recur regularly in the KD to indicate the theological inconceivability of sin. 2 The chapter thus focuses particularly on the material pertaining to the doctrine of sin in the following sections of KD: III/3, §50; IV/1, §60; IV/2, §65; and IV/3, §70, as well as in Karl Barth, Das christliche Leben: Die Kirchliche Dogmatik IV,4, Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, Vorlesungen 1959–1961 [hereafter DcL] (Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe 7; Zürich: TVZ, 1976), §78. All translations of DcL are the author’s own; the published English translation is The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics Volume IV, Part 4, Lecture Fragments, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981). 1

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of sin and its implications for the dogmatic location of the doctrine of sin. It moves, second, to consider the way in which Barth describes human sin and the sinful person, and the relationship that exists between the two. In a third section, it treats of both the ontology and the origin of sin, drawing at this point particularly on Barth’s doctrine of nothingness. It turns, fourth, to delineate the way in which Barth construes the powers unleashed in the world by human sin. And finally, the chapter closes by reflecting on the difficulties of attending to the doctrine of sin acknowledged in luminous fashion by Barth himself and the call to resist the power of sin that confronts disciples of Jesus Christ in all times and places.

The Knowledge of Sin For Barth, knowledge of human sin – not only what it is but also that it is – comes from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In Barth’s view, then, ‘That the human being is a person of sin, what their sin is, and what it means for them, is known as Jesus Christ is known – only then, but really then’.3 This is the central epistemological claim that Barth makes in respect of sin, and it has two immediate theological consequences. First, and positively, it means that God has judged the person of sin in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in doing so, has revealed the person of sin as put to death and destroyed once and for all. Barth begins by observing that the way in which people respond to Jesus Christ in the New Testament reveals that human opposition to the will of God is a reality, and that it takes place in three forms: the denial of God, the hatred of the neighbour, and the destruction of the self.4 When Jesus Christ takes upon himself the consequences of this rejection, he not only reveals that human sin is truly real, but also – as the true Judge of humanity who alone knows right from wrong – that human sin is truly sinful, even in the face of every human attempt to evade or escape this judgement.5 And while sin may manifest itself in particular dispositions and actions, Jesus Christ embraces solidarity not so much with individual sins as with all sinners. This means that the sinful act and the sinful person References to page numbers in the translation will be given in parentheses following the reference in the original. 3 KD IV/1, p. 430 (p. 389). 4 KD IV/1, p. 441 (p. 399). 5 KD IV/1, p. 446 (p. 403).



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cannot be separated – hence Barth’s claim that ‘One is what one does.’6 Finally, the history of Jesus Christ reveals that whichever form sin may take, God is truly Lord over it: ‘as wrong sans phrase, [sin] is not tolerated in the death of Jesus Christ, let alone affirmed – it is not simply condemned, but broken and discarded.’7 The event of the cross and the resurrection declares that the power of sin is broken by forgiveness and the sinful human being is both reconciled with God and in transition to righteousness.8 Second, and negatively, it means that Barth conceives of any understanding of sin which does not derive from this revelation of Jesus Christ ‘as meaningless and superfluous, moreover as misleading, as futile, as itself a form – perhaps the grandest form – of sin’.9 Without reference to Jesus Christ, it is certainly the case that people may consider themselves to be finite, incomplete, and imperfect; but such self-awareness is for Barth very far from a genuine recognition of oneself as truly sinful.10 The sole criterion of human sin is the will of God. Correspondingly, the attempt to ground a doctrine of sin autonomously – whether in human reason, knowledge, conscience, or experience – is an endeavour immediately and irrevocably entangled in precisely the web of sin which it is trying to recognise and describe: it can therefore only go awry. Indeed, even to attempt to ground a doctrine of sin in this way is to suggest that there exists a revelation of God independent of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Against this possibility, and in a reprise of his argument against any pursuit of natural theology, Barth insists that it is not possible to divide God into a god in Christ and a god outside Christ.11 Hence he concludes that ‘to the extent that the human being supposes to know about Law and sin also “from nature” and thus (because the Law of God is written on their heart) from themselves, their knowledge of either will no longer be the knowledge of faith’.12 This epistemological claim finds formal confirmation in the ordering of the Church Dogmatics, where the doctrine of sin is only attended once the doctrine of the person and work of Jesus Christ has been considered. There is thus for Barth no independent or autonomous doctrine of sin: instead, the doctrine of sin is derivative of Christology, and it can only appear in a work of Christian doctrine in a subsequent position. KD IV/1, p. 449 (p. 405). KD IV/1, p. 455 (p. 410). KD IV/1, p. 457 (p. 412). KD IV/1, p. 431 (p. 389). 10 KD IV/1, p. 397 (p. 360). 11 KD IV/1, p. 401 (p. 363). 12 KD IV/1, p. 411 (p. 372). 8 9 6 7

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The Description of Sin and the Sinner The revelation of Jesus Christ not only reveals that sin is, but also what sin is. As noted above, sin is simply opposition to the will of God. If what God wills is revealed in the divine action in Jesus Christ – and if what God wills is that humanity corresponds to this action – then human sin for Barth can be defined as follows: ‘human sin is human action which does not correspond to the divine action in Jesus Christ but contradicts it’.13 In the Church Dogmatics, the divine action in Jesus Christ is explored under three distinct aspects: the humiliation of God in the servitude of the divine Son; the exaltation of humanity in the Lordship of the human Jesus; and these two together as the truth of reconciliation guaranteed by Jesus Christ the Mediator.14 Human action fails to correspond to the divine action in each and all of these three aspects, and this consequently leads Barth to three distinct characterisations of human sin as contradiction of the work of God. First, Jesus Christ both effects and reveals the divine obedience and humility as the Son of God becomes a servant for the sake of humanity without ceasing to be the Lord. However, the response of human beings in face of this divine action is not a corresponding obedience and humility. Rather, Barth declares, ‘all along the line … the meaning and character of actual human sin is pride – in opposition to what one might in view of the being and action of Jesus Christ call the divine humility’.15 This pride is a first form of the disobedience and unbelief of humanity. Its manifestation and effect is that human beings desire to be as gods and as lords, to be their own judges and their own saviours. Second, Jesus Christ both effects and reveals the exaltation of humanity as the Son of Man becomes the Lord. However, the response of human beings in face of this divine action does not correspond to the royal humanity elevated in Him or to the resultant direction given by the Spirit. Instead, Barth observes, human beings are guilty of ‘sloth … the evil inaction which is absolutely forbidden and reprehensible’.16 This sloth is a second form of the disobedience and unbelief of humanity, and also evidences clearly human ingratitude and human rejection in respect of the divine grace. Its manifestation and effect is to bring forth the stupidity, the inhumanity, the dissipation, and above all the anxiety of human sin. 16 13 14 15

KD IV/1, p. 460 (p. 415). KD IV/1, pp. 151–2 (p. 138). KD IV/1, p. 464 (p. 418). KD IV/2, p. 452 (p. 403).



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Third, Jesus Christ reveals the glory of the Mediator and of the reconciliation achieved for all humanity in Him. However, the response of human beings in face of this divine action does not correspond to the glory and light of this event. Instead, Barth avers that here, ‘as a contradiction of the truth encountering the human being, sin appears in the form of falsehood’.17 This falsehood is a final form of the disobedience and unbelief of humanity, resisting both the divine promise declared and the human freedom offered in the work of Jesus Christ. Its manifestation and effect is either the evasion and avoidance of the truth of reconciliation, or its domestication and accommodation in specifically Christian falsehood. These three characterisations indicate the manner in which Barth perceives human ways in the world to contradict and oppose God’s ways in the world and therefore to be sinful. For Barth, human sin is always pride, always sloth, and always falsehood: the three characterisations are thus complementary in referring to the unity and totality of sin rather than mutually exclusive. Yet as noted above, Barth insists that the sinful act and the sinful person cannot in any way be separated, hence these three aspects of human sin also have relevance for the way in which Barth conceives of the human person as sinner. The implication of the pride of humanity, for Barth, is the fall of humanity. Human beings are fallen creatures whose corruption is so radical and complete that all human persons and all human actions are implicated. Correspondingly, Barth writes that ‘in the whole ambit of the realisation of human life there are no exceptions to the transgression and corruption of humanity, no untroubled area in which they do not sin and are not perverse but are in order and therefore innocent’.18 The sloth of humanity, meanwhile, has the implication of misery for humanity. In light of revelation, Barth observes, ‘instead of being the ones who are exalted in and with [Jesus Christ], we are discovered as those existing in untruth, remaining in exile and therefore in misery’.19 The individual is thus involved in a vicious and repeating circle of movement from slothful existence through slothful decision to slothful action, from which misery they are unable to escape. The implication of falsehood, finally, is the condemnation of humanity. This condemnation arises, Barth asserts, because the human being ‘not only refuses to accept the truth of salvation from guilt and servitude, but also wants to turn that truth into its opposite’.20 In this evasion of the forgiveness 20 17 18 19

KD IV/3, p. 426 (p. 369). KD IV/1, p. 552 (p. 496). KD IV/2, p. 546 (p. 483). KD IV/3, p. 531 (p. 462).

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and freedom promised in Jesus Christ, the human being stand under the threat of future damnation, which in the form of its present influence deforms, distorts and corrupts their being. In sum, the being of the sinner is completely pervaded by sin. This picture of human existence as fallen, miserable and false reflects the utter seriousness with which Barth takes human sinfulness. It is a searing indictment of any attempt to minimise or domesticate the gravity and extent of sin. There is no act or thought or dimension of human life which is not over-shadowed by its baleful influence and impact. At the same time, it is a powerful image of the radical corruption of God’s good creation which sin entails. The existence of the creature in sin is an existence contrary to their true human being, a false existence in which they ‘choose their impossibility’.21 Yet this series of negations is not the final word which Barth has to offer in respect of the human being as sinner. For however powerful the self-determination of the human being for a life of disobedience and opposition to God may be, still the power of the divine determination of the human being is original and unchangeable. The message of the Gospel, as Barth understands it, is that human beings remain the object of the grace and forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ even in the depths of their sin. And consequently, if they are ‘godless’, they are so only relatively, and not ontologically. Barth writes: ‘God does not cease to be God, Creator, and covenant Lord even of this fallen human being … thus the human being cannot cease in their fall to be God’s creature and covenant companion.’22 On the one hand, then, no matter how far the creature falls, it cannot fall lower than the extent to which God has descended for its sake in the humiliation of Jesus Christ. And on the other hand, in the exaltation of Jesus Christ, the human being is rescued from the misery of sloth, and the bondage of the will is broken by the event of the crucifixion. The consequence is the liberation of the individual to live in true freedom, which means, for Barth, to live ‘in the choosing of faith, obedience, gratitude, and loyalty to God which corresponds to [their] own election and creation and determination’.23 It is simply not within the power of humanity to pervert the truth of Jesus Christ into falsehood. The result of this conception of sin and of the sinner is that human life exists under two contradicting determinations: first, there is the radical and unlimited corruption of the individual effected by sin; and second, there is the absolute KD III/2, p. 162 (p. 136). KD IV/1, p. 534 (p. 480). 23 KD IV/2, p. 559 (p. 494). 21 22



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and unmerited salvation of the individual from sin in Jesus Christ. Both of these determinations exist simultaneously, and both are complete determinations, consequently there is no aspect of the life of the individual that is not subject to them. The key move that Barth makes in this connection is to dynamise the relation between these determinations. Barth contends that whoever has their future in the kingdom of the Son of God has their past in the kingdom of darkness.24 Thus instead of seeing human beings as statically determined by the old life and the new life, Barth conceives human beings as living a history in motion – as being retrospectively totally determined by human sin and prospectively totally determined in Jesus Christ. In other words, the person of sin has no future for God because that person has been put to death in Jesus Christ on the cross; conversely, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ to new life, the only life that is now open to them is life in the kingdom of God. Pride, sloth and falsehood are determinants only of the absurd life that is always passing and already vanquished; humility, exaltation and truth are the determinants of the real life that is always arriving and already present. And against this background, the persistence of human sin in the present can only reflect ‘the paradox and absurdity of human being’.25

The Ontology of Sin In light of the revelation of Jesus Christ, Barth advances an innovative understanding of the ontology of sin. His position can be explored by means of two complementary sets of delimitations advanced in his survey of the doctrine of reconciliation. The first set of delimitations describes the ontological position of sin in relation to God and to humanity. On the one hand, sin does not belong to the good creation of God, but ‘can only be present and effective in creation as an alien [Fremdling]’.26 On the other hand, sin is not itself ‘a creator’, for it is ‘incapable of any creation, and completely unproductive in the world of the creature’.27 The second set of delimitations describes the effective power of sin in relation to God and to humanity. On the one hand, sin has ‘its essence and existence only in its opposition to the will of God and therefore also in opposition to the essence and the determination of [God’s] creature’ such that 27 24 25 26

KD IV/1, p. 559 (p. 502). KD IV/1, p. 559 (p. 502). KD IV/1, p. 153 (p. 139). KD IV/1, p. 153 (p. 140).

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it can only ‘negate, deny, destroy, dismantle, dissolve’.28 On the other hand, sin has no autonomous existence: ‘Scripture leaves no doubt that even [sin] is under [God’s] Lordship, and that even [sin] must serve [God].’29 The effect of these two sets of delimiting affirmations is to indicate that Barth finds sin to be completely absurd and irrational. On the basis of the first delimitations, it is something neither creatorly nor creaturely, and thus has a (third) manner of reality which is entirely its own. On the basis of the second delimitations, it is something solely destructive yet utterly subordinate, and thus deeply dangerous yet completely impotent. In short, sin is an intrusive and interruptive power which strikes at the heart of the covenant of God with humanity, but is already contradicted and defeated by the action of God in Jesus Christ. The background to this understanding of sin is Barth’s earlier doctrine of ‘nothingness’ (das Nichtige) – of that opposition and resistance to God’s governance of the world which threatens both the creature and the covenant. In that earlier doctrine, Barth writes that human sin is the most important of all the forms of nothingness: in its aspect as the ‘act and guilt of humanity’, it is ‘the concrete form in which, in view of Jesus Christ, nothingness is effective and becomes visible’.30 Sin is linked to the notion of personal responsibility here: the individual is and is made to be responsible for it in the act of disobedience.31 At the same time, human sin does not exhaust the power of nothingness. Though it never diminishes the total responsibility of human beings for their (sinful) actions, Barth notes that Scripture also describes sin as a ‘succumbing to the alien power of [an] enemy’.32 In addition to real sin, he comments, there is ‘real evil and real death … a real devil with its horde and a real hell’.33 All these forces of nothingness assail not only the creature but also God; yet all these forces are confronted and overcome by God in the history of Jesus Christ. The question of the origin of nothingness and sin looms large at this point. For Barth, ‘Nothingness is that other from which God separates Godself, in opposition to which [God] asserts Godself and enforces God’s positive will’.34 In other words, nothingness is an unavoidable by-product of divine activity: insofar as God in eternity wills positively to elect humanity in Jesus Christ as the purpose and goal of creation, there is something which God does not will. 30 31 32 33 34 28 29

KD IV/1, p. 153 (pp. 139–40). KD IV/1, p. 153 (p. 140). KD III/3, p. 347 (p. 305). KD III/3, p. 347 (p. 306). KD III/3, p. 352 (p. 310). KD III/3, p. 353 (p. 310). KD III/3, p. 405 (p. 351).



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As God elects, so too God rejects; as God says ‘Yes’, so God also says ‘No’. For Barth, nothingness only exists on this basis; but on this basis, nothingness does exist. Further speculation on the origin of nothingness Barth does not venture. Certainly, Barth once again denies to nothingness the same kind of autonomous existence that the Creator has – there is no trace of dualism or competition here. And Barth also denies to nothingness the same kind of willed existence that the creature has – God cannot be said to be the Author of sin and nothingness as he is the Author of creation. But Barth also denies that nothingness has no existence, or that its existence is merely appearance or illusion. And the result is that he is left with the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that ‘Only the divine non-willing may be understood as the basis of its existence’.35 In other words, and mysteriously, the actuality of sin only exists in the event of its being negated. For Barth, such a paradoxical understanding of the character and origin of nothingness is confirmed by the biblical account of the first sin of humanity. He observes with reference to the Fall of Adam and Eve that ‘[sin] is plainly and simply that which God did not, does not, and will not desire; it has the essence only of non-essence, and can only exist as this non-essence’.36 At the same time, the sin of Adam and Eve confirms that this nothingness does exist, that it is a real factor confronting both creation and God. Yet Barth does not seek to thematize the origin of sin in the Garden of Eden at any point, nor to invoke either Eve or the serpent as in any meaningful way responsible for the entrance of sin into the good creation, for a transition from an original state of perfection to a subsequent state of corruption. Rather, and by contrast, Barth contends that ‘There never was a golden age. There is no point looking back to one. The first person was immediately the first sinner.’37 This last point is revisited in Barth’s exploration of the question of the transmission of sin, which also emerges immediately in this connection. Barth notes that in the early church, ‘original sin’ – the sinfulness of the life of an individual as such without reference to the actual sins they committed – was regarded as hereditary, being passed down from the first human couple to all their successors by way of reproduction.38 And Barth certainly acknowledges the importance of the concept of original sin, the view that without qualification the being of the sinful human being is radically and totally evil. Yet Barth is very unhappy with 38 35 36 37

KD IV/1, p. 407 (p. 353). KD IV/1, p. 406 (p. 352). KD IV/1, p. 567 (p. 508). KD IV/1, p. 557 (p. 500).

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the idea of original sin being transmitted by way of reproduction, because he considers it to obscure the responsibility of the individual for that sin. Under such an idea, original sin becomes ‘my fate, which I can certainly admit, yet not responsibly confess, for which I cannot consider myself responsible’.39 And for this reason, Barth rejects the concept of hereditary sin (Erbsünde) as naturalistic and deterministic, and prefers instead to posit an alternative conception of original sin (Ursünde) as essential. This revised conception of original sin which Barth advances rests upon the idea that God sees, addresses, and treats humanity as a unity on account of the disobedience that is radical and universal. Barth writes that ‘The verdict that all have sinned implies a judgment on that which is human history apart from the will and word and word of God’.40 This history bears the name of ‘Adam’, in Barth’s view, on account of Adam being the first sinner. Yet Adam was simply the first among equals, and not at all someone who passes on sin as an inheritance or a poison: ‘What is done after him is not done according to an example that irresistibly dominates, [or] in an imitation of his deed imposed upon his descendants.’41 Barth correspondingly inserts a notion of responsibility into the idea of original sin, for those who follow Adam do so in freedom and in personal responsibility. In this understanding, Adam is therefore the representative of humanity in its sinfulness, such that all human beings ‘are already represented in his person and work’.42 In this way, the sin of Adam is written over all human beings, for, Barth concludes, ‘in the person and deed of Adam, God has judged and condemned the whole of humanity, the whole history of the world, all of us as concluded in disobedience’.43 This is what original sin means for Barth: that the whole of human history, including individual human beings and their individual actions, stands before the divine judgement under the sign of Adam. In his act of disobedience, then, Adam is the representative archetype, not a biological progenitor. But even this is only known, for Barth, in the revelation of Jesus Christ, ‘in whose obedience God has desired to have and has had mercy on many and again on all’.44

41 42 43 44 39 40

KD IV/1, p. 558 (p. 500). KD IV/1, p. 563 (p. 503). KD IV/1, p. 566 (p. 508). KD IV/1, p. 569 (p. 510). KD IV/1, p. 570 (p. 512). KD IV/1, p. 572 (p. 513).



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The Lordless Powers The forces of nothingness include, but – as noted above – are not limited to human sin. For this reason, Barth considers that it is necessary to consider ‘not only the rebellion of the human being against God, but also the rebellion produced by that rebellion, that of human forces rising up as lordless powers against the human being itself ’.45 Given that they emerge from the sphere of creaturely existence, these lordless powers have no separate existence or dominion of their own, not even in their opposition to the human creature. And in common with all forms of nothingness, they remain unequivocally under the Lordship of God, even as they seek to oppose God, and succeed in mastering humanity. Indeed, such powers have what Barth describes as a ‘pseudo-objective reality and efficacy’, exerting influence upon human affairs even as their identity is marked by ‘obscurity and ambiguity and opacity’.46 They take different forms at different times, and are transient yet persistent – appearing, disappearing and reappearing in all circles of human life. Barth observes that the New Testament refers to such powers regularly, without often naming or describing them explicitly. And indeed, for Barth, the same powers are at work in the world today, only they are less clearly seen. At this point, he is deeply and explicitly aware that some of his material on these powers that follows will seem rather ‘magical’ to those of a more rational or scientific view of the world. Yet Barth suggests that ‘we live in a world … which still desperately requires dis-enchantment, because even to the present day it is in truth a still enchanted world, enchanted by the existence and lordship … of lordless powers’.47 For this reason, he proceeds to identify some of these lordless powers. Barth finds the scriptural material on the lordless powers to refer first to all forms of political absolutism, to ‘the demonic which is active and effective in all politics’.48 The form of this absolutism may vary – it may be monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, nationalist, or socialist – but common across these manifestations is a concern for the idea of ‘“empire”’ or ‘Leviathan’ – ‘the myth of the state’.49 This is the temptation of power which overpowers all exercise of political responsibility emancipated from responsibility to God. 47 48 49 45 46

DcL, p. 366 (p. 215). DcL, pp. 366–7 (p. 215). DcL, p. 372 (p. 218). DcL, p. 374 (p. 219). DcL, pp. 374–5 (p. 220).

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The second referent of the idea of lordless powers, according to Barth, is explicitly named in Scripture – Mammon, the demonic power of material resources. Again, the key to understanding this power as lordless is in recognising its insidious significance when it is decoupled from responsibility to God. Barth opines that as the individual wants to have money without God, so necessarily ‘this useful fiction [of money], harmless in itself, become an absolutist demon, and the human being becomes its slave and plaything’.50 Barth proceeds to outline two further sets of lordless powers. First, there are intellectual constructs or ideologies which, Barth notes, ‘rise up in individual and in social life in particular times and places like monstrous balloons shimmering in all colours’.51 Again, it is in the hands of the individual who has fallen from God that Barth considers such ideas to become dangerous and idolatrous. Second, there are chthonic forces, which pertain to human creatures as corporeal beings in a created world. Rightly used, they serve the appropriate biblical concept of the dominion of the human being over the earth. Yet wrongly used, they ‘serve to bind the one who has been removed from God, to obligate, to tyrannise, to lead where that one does not wish to go’.52 These chthonic powers, for Barth, include the powers of technology, of sport, of pleasure, and of transportation. There are two repeated refrains throughout this exposition of the lordless powers. On the one hand, Barth insists that they all relate to facets of human existence which are creaturely and thus necessary, and which are in and of themselves not sinful but either neutral or even good in their orientation. As their use is disciplined by awareness of the goodness of creation and the requirement of obedience, then they are not lordless powers at all, but dimensions of creaturely life in the free service of God and of humanity. However, as they are ‘liberated’ from their proper use in the service of God and of humanity at the hands of sinful humanity, they take on a life of their own, and move to opposing not only God but also humanity. In other words, in their deployment in opposition to God, they are no longer powers at the disposal of humanity; instead, humanity comes to be at the disposal of these powers, who have no creaturely lord at all. Instead of serving the freedom of humanity, then, they serve to enslave humanity: ‘the individual just as the society they drag this way and that, and tear them both apart’.53 53 50 51 52

DcL, p. 382 (p. 224). DcL, p. 385 (p. 225). DcL, p. 390 (pp. 228–9). DcL, p. 398 (p. 233).



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On the other hand, Barth continues to insist that these powers do ultimately have a Lord, and that it is God to whom they were and are and will be subject. Just as the power of sin and of nothingness is confronted by the power of God, so too in the case of the lordless powers, Barth declares that ‘Standing opposed to the kingdom of human disorder is the kingdom of divine order’.54 God would not be God if there was not a limit to these powers, and that limit is resolutely set and found in the history of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. Barth states: ‘In Him [is] the righteousness and order of God which contests, defeats, overcomes, and eliminates the unrighteousness and disorder of humanity.’55

Conclusion This chapter has outlined the most significant contours of Barth’s doctrine of sin. In the process, it has traversed concisely some significant theological terrain: his view of theological epistemology and dogmatic location in respect of sin; the conceptions of human sin and human personhood which result; his treatment of the essence and the basis of sin and nothingness; and his construal of the lordless powers which enslave the human being who seeks freedom from God. At every point, the chapter has sought faithfully to represent Barth as speaking with an apparent confidence that is evident throughout his dogmatic work. Yet to rest there would be to overlook, first, one of Barth’s most important insights concerning theological engagement with the doctrine of sin. And it would be to overlook, second, the note of hope and resistance which Barth regularly sounds in the course of his exposition. It is to these two matters that this conclusion now briefly turns. First, at the start of his doctrine of nothingness, Barth notes that issues concerning the lordship of God and the threat of nothingness offer ‘an extraordinarily clear demonstration of the necessary brokenness of all theological thinking and speaking’.56 On the one hand, Barth acknowledges that such brokenness is inevitable in any and every realm of theological discourse, and that theology can never claim or achieve completeness. On the other hand, however, he argues that this limitation is especially evident here, for ‘the existence, presence, and reality of nothingness, the knowledge of which is at issue here, is indeed also

DcL, p. 399 (p. 233). DcL, p. 429 (p. 249). 56 KD III/3, p. 332 (p. 293). 54 55

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objectively the break in the relationship between Creator and creature’.57 At this point, then, the cause of the limitation of all theology is directly thematized. The result of the general limitation is that while a theologian may seek to work systematically, and indeed ought to proceed with ‘good order and strict objectivity’, they must nevertheless not seek to enforce or counterfeit a system in theology.58 And hence throughout its work, but here in exemplary fashion, Barth writes, theology is to desire to ‘correspond … to its object precisely [yet] only in broken thoughts and statements’.59 This means that far from seeking to understand or comprehend sin and nothingness at this point in the dogmatic enterprise, and far from eliding or circumventing the diverse theological truths that seem in tension here, the theologian will simply be concerned ‘to narrate everything correctly’.60 To describe sin accurately is all that can be attempted. Second, the robust acknowledgement of the presence of sin under which not only the theologian but also the world labours does not at any point lead Barth to advocate pessimism or quietism in face of its challenge. The action of God in the history of Jesus Christ has already defeated the power of sin and rendered its ongoing actuality a matter of absurdity and impossibility. And so, for Barth, the Christian is called not to despair concerning the reality of opposition to God in the world, but instead to hope for the fulfilment of the kingdom of God in the return of Jesus Christ. In all its doubt and frailty, such a life in hope is, Barth writes, an ‘existence in expectation of the coming of Jesus Christ for judgement and therefore of the end and therefore of the coming of eternal life’.61 Yet the hope of the Christian in face of sin is not simply individual. Barth writes that ‘the Christian hopes in order to show in doing so that there is a basis and a reason for all people, for the whole world to hope with them’.62 And the hope of the Christian in face of sin is not only dispositional. Instead, the hope of the Christian expresses itself in action. On the one hand, there is the primary and decisive action of prayer for the coming of the kingdom – prayer that is necessary, directed only to God, and certain of being heard.63 On the other hand, as Barth states, Christians ‘exist under the obligatory demand to a very particular rebellion’64 – namely, the fight of faith against ‘the human

60 61 62 63 64 57 58 59

KD III/3, p. 333 (p. 294). KD III/3, p. 333 (pp. 295, 294). KD III/3, p. 333 (p. 294). KD III/3, p. 334 (p. 295). KD IV/3, p. 1072 (p. 934). KD IV/3, p. 1071 (p. 933). DcL, pp. 423–4 (p. 245). DcL, p. 350 (p. 207).



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unrighteousness which contradicts and opposes the order and righteousness of God that saves humanity’.65 In this era between the defeat of sin in Jesus Christ and the consummation of the kingdom of God, the appropriate response of the theologian to the impossible reality of sin is thus for Barth one which moves from acknowledgement to opposition. Acknowledgement is necessary to allow for an honest appraisal of the situation of humanity in light of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ – for a recognition of the gravity of human sinfulness and the scope of its implications for all human life, including work in theology. Opposition is necessary to witness in hope to the fact that sin has already been defeated in the history of Jesus Christ and will be inexorably vanquished in his return – and that the Christian in the present is called to liberation from sin and rebellion against its power and its effects. For all its seriousness and pervasiveness in the present, for all the mystery and uncertainty of its origin, sin has no hope and no future in the kingdom of God that is to come.

DcL, 363 (p. 213).

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Part III

Dogmatic Issues

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Original Sin Ian A. McFarland

The Bible defines sin in neutral terms as ‘lawlessness’ (1 Jn 3.4), but in contemporary English it is very much a religious word. Even when used colloquially to refer to things not viewed by the speaker as evil or damaging in any morally serious sense (e.g. ‘chocolate sin’, ‘living in sin’), the term’s rhetorical force comes from its roots in religious discourse. And yet while non-religious persons are unlikely to use the word in anything other than its popular, non-serious sense, the idea of sin is not necessarily alien to secular sensibilities. The word’s strong religious (and, more specifically, Christian and ecclesiastical) connotations may discourage its use, but there seems little reason to believe that any significant segment of the North American population would object to the idea that there are human acts – and even thoughts – that merit moral censure. In this sense at least the concept of sin is not alien to the wider culture, even if the vocabulary may seen arcane or alien. In many traditional Christian theologies, however, morally objectionable acts and thoughts – what are technically termed actual sins – do not get at the heart of the phenomenon of sin. Although the damage they cause may be both clear and profound, they remain theologically epiphenomenal: the natural and unavoidable consequence of a more fundamental problem known as original sin. When sin is understood in this sense, it is much harder to argue for any correspondence between it and the sensibilities of modern western (and increasingly global) culture. This is because the doctrine of original sin holds that human moral failing is not something that takes place over time through an individual’s committing evil deeds but is rather a congenital state that renders such deeds inevitable. It teaches that sin is at bottom a matter of being rather than doing, such that we are not sinners because we commit sins; rather, we commit sins because we are already sinners. Even within churches that have

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traditionally subscribed to the doctrine of original sin, this claim has become a source of profound discomfort in the modern period; outside of them it is widely viewed as both incredible and repulsive.

Origins of the Doctrine Like the Trinity, the doctrine of original sin is not explicitly defined in Scripture and emerged only through a lengthy process of reflection on the implications of the biblical witness for Christian faith and practice. Unlike the Trinity, however, it has never been the object of ecumenical consensus, having long been viewed by Orthodox Christians in particular with considerable suspicion. In order to understand this lack of consensus, it is important to distinguish original sin from the related doctrine of the fall, which has been much more widely received as an appropriate way of referring to a fundamental deformation of human nature rooted in humankind’s primordial history. While contemporary biblical scholars tend to interpret the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden as a folktale explaining the origins of pain in childbirth and the toil associated with food production, early Christians saw it as describing a more profound – and catastrophic – transformation of the human condition. Human life had been intended to be one of joyful intimacy with God and other creatures, but the first couple’s act of disobedience permanently distorted this relationship. Because of this culpable ‘fall’ from the state of harmony in and for which they had been created, human beings now live in a state of profound alienation from God, the environment and each other that has death – eternal exclusion from the divine presence – as its inexorable consequence. At least part of the reason the doctrine of the fall gained currency in the early church was that it provided Christians with a coherent theodicy: an explanation of how belief in a good God was compatible with the reality of evil. After a considerable amount of debate, early Christians had rejected dualistic ontologies that explained evil in the world either as the result of some imperfection in God’s own being or as unavoidable outcome of God’s having to work with an inherently imperfect material substrate. Instead, they affirmed that the material world was in itself ‘very good’ (Gen. 1.31) by virtue of its having been created in its entirety by a God who was both absolutely good and whose creative activity was not limited or constrained by any other power. Yet if evil could not be attributed to divine impotence or incompetence, what was its source? The doctrine of the fall gave an answer: evil was introduced



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into the world by human beings, disrupting the harmony of creation and leaving a legacy of pain, suffering and death.1 By attributing the origin of evil to human malfeasance, the doctrine of the fall thus took God off the hook for evil. Moreover, associating evil with human disobedience dovetailed well with another central Christian conviction: the reality of human freedom. In the midst of a pagan culture that from the level of popular religion to the most elevated philosophies was imbued with a heavy dose of fatalism, Christian theologians throughout the patristic period placed enormous weight on freedom of the will as a defining feature of humankind.2 In this way, the claim that the experience of evil was not an unavoidable or natural consequence of the world’s physical structure had as its corollary the conviction that there was no basis for human resignation before the power of evil: we have been instructed to choose the good, are equipped to do so, and are therefore rightly held accountable when we fail. In this manner, the doctrine of the fall established two principles that framed early Christian reflection on sin: first, that the experience of evil originates in the transgression of the first human beings; and second, that human beings could sin then and can sin now because they are free (viz. morally accountable) agents who have both the duty and the ability to resist sin. Yet although Christian belief in the fall and human freedom fit together neatly in the thought of many of the early church’s most influential thinkers, it was at their intersection that the doctrine of original sin emerged. The crucial figure here was Augustine of Hippo (354–430), and the stimulus for his theological innovation was the teaching of the British ascetic Pelagius, whose insistence on the inviolable character of human freedom even after the fall seemed to Augustine to undermine the most fundamental of Christian convictions: the status of Christ as humanity’s sole Saviour. To be sure, early Christians also believed that angelic beings (viz. demons) had turned from God, and they recognized that Gen. 3 itself does not view human sin as purely self-generated (Adam and Eve do not simply decide to disobey God spontaneously but are rather tempted by the serpent). Yet these factors were not understood to absolve humans of responsibility for the presence of sin and evil in the world. 2 See Irenaeus of Lyons: ‘… all human beings are of the same nature, able both to hold fast and to do what is good; and, on the other hand, having also the power to cast it from them and not to do it’ (Against Heresies, 4.37.2, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson [eds], The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, vol. 1 of Ante-Nicene Fathers [American edn, Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885, reprint Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999], translation slightly altered.); and Gregory of Nyssa: ‘Thus there is in us the principle of all excellence, all virtue and wisdom … but pre-eminent among all is the fact that we are free from necessity, and not in bondage to any natural power, but have decision in our own power as we please …’ (On the Making of Man, 16.11, in Henry Austin Wilson (trans.), Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, etc., vol. 5 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series [Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1893, reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995]). 1

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Although he accepted that the fall had affected the material conditions of human existence by bringing in its wake mortality and subjection to the passions, Pelagius taught that all people retained freedom to choose good or evil. Given the emphasis on human freedom among Christian theologians up to that point, it seems pretty clear that Pelagius did not see himself as an innovator here – and neither did many others.3 While the precise features of Pelagius’ thought continue to be debated, Augustine understood him to teach that human beings could avoid sin by their own efforts. If this were true, Augustine argued, then Christ could not without qualification be proclaimed as Saviour of all, since it was at least logically possible that some human beings earned salvation by their own merit, by making use of their God-given freedom to avoid sin. It was Augustine’s contention that this conclusion undermined the heart of the Christian faith: that all without distinction need to look to Christ for their salvation. They need to do so, Augustine maintained, because the fall did not simply render us prone to sin, but actually made us sinners from birth. In short, for Augustine the good news that Jesus saves had as its corollary that all without exception need saving, which means that human sinfulness must be viewed as a congenital state and not just as a condition we acquire through our own individual actions subsequent to birth. Whatever the particular ensemble of actual sins each of us commits over the course of our lives, all of us are equally beset by original sin from birth. There are two points in particular worth noting about Augustine’s position. First, he does not derive his doctrine of original sin from any empirical judgements about the depth or breadth of human wickedness. To be sure, Augustine had no doubt that universal human sinfulness was both evident in history and well-attested in Scripture, but his claim wasn’t just that all people sin as a matter of fact (something Pelagius would have been happy to affirm), but that all are inherently and unavoidably sinful. This claim was not based on observation, but rather on the conviction that the proclamation of Jesus Christ as the Saviour of all only makes sense if all need to be saved. Second, by deriving his understanding of the fall and sin from the demands of soteriology in this way, Augustine created a framework within which it becomes possible to decouple both doctrines from theodicy. Where the fall is Though Augustine’s influence led to Pelagius’ condemnation (in absentia) at a local council in Carthage in 411, he had a much less hostile reception in the East, where he attended and was exonerated of heresy at a council in Diospolis (Lydda) in 415. Moreover, although ‘the doctrines of Caelestius’ (Pelagius’ seemingly more extreme follower) were explicitly condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, Pelagius himself was not.

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invoked to explain why people need to be saved rather than as an explanation for the existence evil, the doctrine’s focus shifts from justifying human suffering to stressing God’s commitment to end that suffering. Although Augustine himself did not develop either of these points consistently in his own writing, both are important for the defence of original sin as a doctrine of continuing significance for the church.

Objections to the Doctrine Before attempting such a defence, however, it is important to take stock of the objections that have been raised to Augustine’s position from his own time up to the present day. These objections centre on the claim that human beings are congenitally sinful, and the most well established of them is that if human beings are born sinners, then they can’t be held responsible for their sin. Augustine responded to this objection by refusing to equate human freedom with what later thinkers would call ‘freedom of indifference’ – the idea that the human will has complete liberty to choose between options presented to it, uninfluenced by any force or power external to it. Augustine maintained that such a position would make it impossible to explain anyone’s actions – even one’s own! One could not appeal to a person’s motives to understand their actions, because if the action were to be truly (viz. ‘indifferently’) free, those motives themselves would have had to be willed, as would the motives for choosing those motives, and so on ad infinitum. Augustine denied that human freedom meant that the will was undetermined in this way. Instead, he argued that willing follows desire, or, more colloquially, that we will things because we want them. Human beings are therefore free not because their actions are inexplicable save by reference to the arbitrary choice of their wills, but rather because our actions (unlike those of creatures driven by instinct) are mediated by our wills, which means that we experience them as ours: whatever it is I may do, I cannot avoid recognizing that I did it – that however many factors may contribute to my action, my agency is always implicated. Drawing on Paul’s reflections in Romans 7, Augustine then identified a crucial problem with our willing: while we will what we desire, the content of our desires is not subject to our wills. Put more colloquially, while we can do what we want, we can’t want what we want. If our desires are good, we will do the good; but when our desires are misdirected, we will – inevitably – sin.

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Uncontroversially, Augustine held that our desires are good when oriented to God, as the source and end of our being. More contentiously, he argued that one consequence of the fall is that our desires are now congenitally turned away from God toward earthly, relative goods, such that all our willing is perverse (literally, turned askew) and thus destructive of both our own and our neighbours’ well-being. That congenital perversion is original sin: as responsible agents, we continue to will what we desire, but our desires are misdirected, and we have no power to right them on our own. Only God’s grace can reorient them to their proper end. Apart from such divine action, we continue to will whatever we do (i.e. our wills are not overridden or bypassed, as though we were compelled to sin by some external force), but because our desires are misdirected, our wills are bound to sin.4 In arguing for this ‘bondage of the will’ as a defining characteristic of unredeemed humanity, Augustine was trying to show that it was possible to affirm that human beings sinned both freely (i.e. as willing agents apart from any external compulsion) and necessarily (i.e. unavoidably). As already noted, the coherence of this position has been challenged by Orthodox theologians and others on the grounds that freedom and necessity are mutually exclusive: a person just cannot be said to sin freely – and thus cannot be rightly held responsible for her sinful actions – if it is impossible for her to avoid sinning. Furthermore, the claim that people are congenitally sinful seems to put God, as the Creator of this inherently sinful humanity, back on the hook for sin. For Augustine’s critics, a meaningful definition of freedom must include the capacity to choose between alternatives (viz. good versus evil), and thus not to sin. By teaching otherwise, Augustine undermines both human agency and God’s goodness. While this objection to Augustinian doctrine has lost none of its force down through the centuries and has increasingly found a hearing even within Catholic and Protestant traditions strongly influenced by Augustine, in the modern period it has been augmented by further considerations. For example, contemporary critics of Augustine have also argued that his insistence on humanity’s incapacity to avoid sin is fatalistic, promoting political quietism and deference to the status quo. After all, if human beings cannot avoid sin, then any attempt to reform existing social arrangements will invariably be marked by sin. To be sure, on Augustinian terms sin’s ubiquity means that the social This does not mean that no good may come of the willing of fallen human beings, but only that such good comes in spite of willing rather than because of it, in line with Joseph’s words to his brothers: ‘you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good’ (Gen. 50.20, RSV).

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structures that are the object of reform are also sinful. But because the serpent tempted the first humans with the promise, ‘you will be like God’ (Gen. 3.5), Augustinians have tended to identify original sin with pride – the Promethean urge to usurp God’s place. They have, correspondingly, also urged that faithful Christian should choose the patient endurance of injustice over revolt against it, since revolt – however serious the injustice may be – invariably manifests this arch-sin of pride.5 A third objection to Augustine’s understanding of original sin attacks its seeming dependence on the theory of monogenesis – that all human beings descend from a single pair.6 According to Augustine, our desires are perverse because Adam and Eve gave into the serpent’s temptation, and the consequences of their primordial disobedience are passed on to their descendants (see Gen. 6–9). Only through this common descent can original sin be ascribed without qualification to all human beings.7 There are, of course, plenty of objections that might be raised to the idea that human beings inherit sin from their ancestors (e.g. it seems to violate the biblical principle that ‘it is only the person who sins that shall die’, Ezek. 18.4; cf. vv. 14, 20); but even apart from such objections, the idea that all human beings share descent from a single pair is no longer credible in light of contemporary understandings of natural history, according to which new species emerge through the separation and movement of ancestral populations and cannot be traced to a single ancestral pair.8

For a notorious example of such ‘Augustinian’ logic, see Martin Luther, Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia, in Charles M. Jacobs (trans.), Robert C. Schultz (ed), The Christian in Society III, vol. 46 of Luther’s Works, American edn, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), pp. 17–43. 6 In this context, it is interesting to note that Augustine’s interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis became increasingly literalistic over time. The exegetical approach in the earlier On Genesis (388) and Confessions (398) is largely figurative; that of the commentaries completed after the outbreak of the Pelagian controversy – including the Literal Meaning of Genesis (c. 400–416) and The City of God (c. 413–426) – markedly less so. 7 Importantly, although Augustine insisted that we were sinners ‘by generation’ (as the only alternative to the Pelagian view that we became sinners only ‘by imitation’), he refused to offer any particular theory about how sin was transmitted across generations. See Augustine, Answer to the Pelagians, III: Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian, 2.178, Roland J. Teske (trans.), John E. Rotelle (ed.) (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999), hereafter UWJ. 8 While it is true that all modern human beings do share a common male and female ancestor (the so-called ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’ and ‘mitochondrial Eve’), these two individuals were not contemporaries and neither was the first modern human. Attempts like in Denis Alexander’s (Creation and Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? [Oxford: Monarch Books, 2008]) to place ‘Adam and Eve’ in Mesopotamia in the Neolithic period simply give up on the logic of Augustine’s position, since by that time human beings had already spread over the globe and thus cannot all have descended from this putative pair. Robert Jenson’s proposal (in The Works of God, vol. 2 of Systematic Theology [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 150) that ‘Adam and Eve’ were ‘the first community of our biological ancestors who disobeyed God’s command’ is more consistent with the Augustinian position (so long as it is understood that all modern humans descended from this first group of 5

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Reclaiming the Doctrine Beginning with Søren Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, a number of prominent theologians (including Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr) have attempted to defend the doctrine of original sin without positing a primordial act of disobedience by the first human beings. According to this perspective, the fall is not a singular event in the past, but rather describes the situation of every human being: all of us are confronted with the temptation to deny our finitude, and we all succumb to it. While this solution meets the challenges of historical plausibility (nothing hangs on the historicity of Adam and Eve) and moral integrity (none of us is punished for an ancestor’s fault), the price paid is to posit a dimension of human existence – even if in practice one that can be recognized only as a possibility that is always already lost – that is not infected by sin and thus implicitly give up on Augustine’s claim that our need for salvation precedes our commission of any actual sin. Instead, this approach defends the fall on quasi-empirical grounds (viz. an introspective analysis of the human condition) that constitutes a turn away from the two positive features of Augustine’s approach – its non-empirical and soteriological orientation – identified above. A better strategy for reclaiming Augustine’s insights into the human predicament for contemporary theology involves clarifying the meaning of freedom by an exploration of the nature of the will. An important first step in this process of clarification is to recognize the fundamental oddity of the will as a feature of human existence. On the one hand, we naturally (and, I think, appropriately) speak of the will as part of human nature, meaning that having a will is one of the features of human being that distinguishes us from non-human animals (whose lack of will means, e.g. that they cannot sin). On the other hand, however, the will is precisely that by which we distinguish ourselves from our natures, since (as noted above) it is by reference to the fact that we will our actions that we identify ourselves as responsible agents rather than as creatures whose behaviour is naturally determined via instinct. In short, the will is odd in that it marks human beings as a creature whose nature is not reducible to the kind of clearly defined behaviours normally associated with the term ‘nature’. It is the nature of beavers to build dams and of wolves to hunt in packs; but to say that it is part of human nature

disobedient hominids), but it would seem to require at least some transmission of original sin ‘by imitation’ within this population group.



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to will is not to claim a particular set of behaviours as characteristic of human beings, but rather to note their nature’s fundamental open-endedness. The oddity of the will – its character as a part of our nature that marks our actions as irreducible to our nature – is further reflected in our understanding of how we come to have the wills we do. On the one hand, as part of human nature the will is congenital. And to say that human beings are born with will is to say that they are born agents (even though a person’s capacity to display of her agency through the exercise the will varies as she moves from infancy through childhood and youth to maturity and senescence). On the other hand, precisely because it is the locus of human agency – that aspect of my nature by virtue of which I experience myself as an I and my actions as mine – the will is that by which we stand over against our natures. So, when considered as a capacity, the will is experienced an inherent part of human nature, so that willing is something we can’t help doing (i.e. human beings are naturally willing creatures). But when considered with respect to any particular exercise of the will, the act of willing is necessarily (i.e. by virtue of its status as a matter of will) claimed by the agent as his own (viz. what I did) and cannot coherently be ascribed to nature. This paradox was captured nicely by Augustine: The will, of course, comes from something, and it is not forced to exist. And if we should not ask for its origin, we ought not to ask for its origin, not because the will does not come from something, but because it is obvious where it comes from. For the will comes from the one whose will it is…the will of the human being from the human being; the will of God from God. Even if God produces in a human being a good will, he, of course does this so that the good will comes to be from the one whose will it is.9

In other words, while in one respect we receive our wills from our parents as part of our human natures, in another our wills are entirely our own; indeed, that it precisely what it means to have a will – that my actions are to be ascribed to me as an individual and not to my nature. This paradoxical character of the will helps to make sense of the idea that sin is something we have from birth without undermining the claim that we remain responsible for our sinfulness. Remember that a crucial feature of the Augustinian position is that original sin is a derivative doctrine: it is deduced from the more fundamental Christian claims that Christ is the Saviour of all, and thus that all need to be saved. If I accept this account, how do I understand Augustine, UWJ, 5.42.

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my own sinfulness? Sin is a matter of the will: a personal turning from God for which I am responsible. Yet if I am and have always been sinful (since Christ has always been my Saviour, even from birth), then it follows that my will is congenitally turned from God, and thus that this feature of my being is inherited. And if it is my conviction that all human beings need to be saved in the same way, then it must be the case that this condition can be traced back to the very first human being: in this sense, human sinfulness is properly (and, indeed, unavoidably) understood as inherited – acquired ‘by generation’ rather than ‘by imitation’.10 But does this conclusion absolve me of my responsibility for my sin? No, not if the will has the characteristics described in the previous paragraphs. For though it follows from the congenital state of my sinfulness that I am born with a fallen will, I cannot displace my responsibility for my sin onto the congenital state of my will, because my will – again, precisely as will – is ineluctably my own. Thus, because sin is a matter of willing turned away from God, it is true both that I was born a sinner and that all my sin is mine. Because the will is that faculty through which I experience myself as an agent, I cannot coherently dissociate any defect in my will from my own agency. The original sin with which I am born is therefore also my own sin. At this point it may appear that this defence of the Augustinian position only serves to accentuate the problematic social implications of original sin. Doesn’t the claim that inherited sin remains sin for which we are responsible re-enforce the worst aspects of the doctrine by indiscriminately ascribing guilt to all persons and thereby fostering an attitude of political quietism that leaves no space for challenging the power of sin in society? It does not, because a defence of the congenital character of original sin in terms of the oddity of the will also individuates original sin in a way that cuts against the doctrine’s use to exacerbate patterns of social marginalization and political conservatism. This process of individuation may be understood as follows: although original sin is inherited by all people (since the fallen will is a defining feature of postlapsarian human existence), because original sin is a matter of will, its manifestation in every individual is necessarily particular to that individual. In other words, while the fallen will always turns away from God, how it does so Clearly, this position implies a historical ‘fall’ that gave rise to this inherited perversion of the will (indeed, it implies that the first human being might be defined theologically as the first to have a fallen will, and thus the first to need saving). As human beings already bound up in this chain of inheritance, however, we can say nothing about what this prelapsarian state would have been like, or how a fall from that state would have occurred. See on this point Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (eds) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), §72.

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varies with the person whose willing is under consideration.11 For because God calls each person to a particular, unsubstitutable place in the body of Christ, what counts as obedience for one human being (e.g. getting married) may not for another. It follows that there is no basis for identifying original sin with any particular form of turning from God’s will (e.g. pride). One may define original sin as unfaithfulness,12 but insofar as what counts as faithfulness to God for any given person varies with God’s call to that person, such a definition is purely formal and provides no ability to identify infallibly any particular action undertaken by an individual human being as a manifestation of sin.13 Of course, it remains a principle of the doctrine of original sin that apart from grace all human actions, whatever their appearance or effect, are shaped by sin: in line with the basic soteriological turn of Augustine’s treatment of the fall, we all are justified by grace and not by our deeds. So to claim that original sin is individuated is not in any sense to claim that there are some human actions that are free from the taint of sin. But precisely because sin is lodged so deeply in human beings that it infects all of us at every point of our existence, there is no basis for identifying one kind of act (e.g. protest of current social, political or economic arrangements) as inherently more likely to be opposed to God’s will than any other (viz. defence of the status quo). The recognition that sin can be overcome only through grace means that there can be no bias toward conservatism (or, for that matter, radicalism) in Christian social ethics. On the contrary, commitment to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin means that easy judgements about right courses of action must give way to long, difficult and context-sensitive practices of discernment to determine what faithful response to God’s call looks like in a particular situation (see Gal. 5.6; 1 Cor. 7.19). At this point, however, the oldest and arguably most intractable complaint against the doctrine of original sin resurfaces: how can a person be held morally As I argue in Chapter 5 of In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Doctrine of Original Sin (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), there seem to me grounds for arguing that there is one case – that of Jesus – where a fallen human will does not turn from God, since the fact that Jesus’ divine hypostasis pre-exists and is thus sovereign over his human nature breaks the link between fallenness and sinfulness that is true of every other postlapsarian human being. 12 See Serene Jones, ‘What’s Wrong with Us’, in Essentials of Christian Theology, William C. Placher (ed.), (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 203), p. 149. In a similar vein Karl Barth defined sin as a refusal of grace. See Dogmatics in Outline, G. T. Thompson (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 105. 13 Are there acts that must be judged inherently sinful, no matter the context? The story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 suggests that it would be unwise to say so. While disobedience to God’s command is always sin, God’s freedom rules out any absolute judgements regarding what God’s command might be in any given instance. This concession, however, does not justify antinomianism, since the acknowledgement that even the Ten Commandments are not an infallible set of prescriptions in any given instance does not undermine their status as a supremely reliable index of God’s will for human behaviour. 11

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accountable for sins that, by virtue of the very constitution of her will as fallen, she cannot avoid committing? How can one speak of the ‘bondage of the will’ and still defend the integrity of human agency? As already noted, Augustine’s solution was to argue that the while the will’s perversion – its inherent orientation to finite (earthly) goods rather than the one infinite (divine) Good – does not render our agency any less real. I may be oriented to money or power or sex or food as the source of my imagined fulfilment, but it is by my willing these things – and thus responsibly – that I seek them out. No one else moves my limbs or directs my thoughts. Externally there may be all kinds of social forces that impact my perceptions and actions, and internally there may be matters of addiction or neurosis to consider; but my actions remain mine, because I cannot avoid the simple grammatical point that, whatever other factors may be in play, in the final analysis I did them. To be sure, attending to the grammar of the willing ‘I’ in this way is not to argue that all human actions are voluntary in the same sense that my writing this sentence is. Many features of human existence of which ‘I’ am the subject are not matters of conscious control (e.g. fatigue) or even awareness (e.g. immune response). But that fact need not be seen as making such experiences (‘I am tired’, ‘I am fighting this infection’) any less matters of will, if willing is understood as the mode by which human beings experience themselves as agents and not as the power to have acted differently in a given situation. The degree to which particular human actions are subject to conscious control varies enormously, and this variability arguably includes ‘higher’ cognitive operations no less than the ‘lower’ functions of the autonomic nervous system (e.g. it seems odd to say that my knowing that 2+2=4, or that every triangle has exactly three sides, is voluntary). But this undeniable variability in the level to which my actions are an object of conscious choice does not affect the fact that all of them, from the most ‘automatic’ to those that are the object of the most painstaking processes of deliberation, are part of my identity as an agent. In this respect, the doctrine of original sin suggests that the will is not best understood as the cause of a person’s actions (as is the case in more ‘libertarian’ accounts of human freedom), but rather as the mode by which my life in all its dimensions is personal – as a function of who I am. At this point, it is helpful to follow the soteriological thrust of the doctrine of original sin a bit further than Augustine himself was inclined to do. For although Augustine’s basic insight – that original sin was to be confessed as a corollary of the doctrine of salvation by grace – cut against the more traditional invocation of the doctrine of the fall in service to theodicy, Augustine himself continued to



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view the fall and its consequences in theodical terms: the only way he could make sense of the pervasiveness of suffering was to assume that it was merited by virtue of original sin.14 If one follows through completely on Augustine’s own soteriological turn, however, original sin no longer functions an explanation for suffering (viz. ‘Humans suffer justly because of their inherent sinfulness’), but rather – and solely – as an explanation of our need for grace (viz. ‘Humans need grace because their wills are congenitally turned away from God’). When this move is made, the affirmation of original sin is no longer bound up with ascription of blame. For while ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3:23), not all sin merits blame. Consider, for example, that Jesus’ references to those who cause others to sin (Mt. 18.6 and pars.) might be applied to those who oppress or abuse the weak, with the consequence that those so afflicted may sin in their own right (e.g. by refusing to trust God’s will for their well-being). Because these actions are ineluctably matters of willing, such folk are no less in need of the healing power of God’s grace than those who have hurt them. But to recognize that human beings, as willing creatures, remain accountable for their willing does not entail the further inference that they are to be blamed for it. Indeed, where original sin is concerned, blame is arguably out of place precisely because it presupposes a level of deliberative control that is not intrinsic to the reality of human willing. That is, precisely because the degree to which I exercise control over my actions is variable (and in practice difficult to diagnose), there can be no neat correlation of sin with blame. As a sinner, I confess that I am accountable for my sin and give thanks for the gift of grace that heals it.15 But to view the suffering I experience as punishment for my sinfulness is to have failed to locate sin theologically as that which is truly known only as it is forgiven – as a corollary of the doctrine of grace and not as an explanation for the experience of evil.

Conclusion: Original Sin and Human Freedom We live in a culture that places a very high value on freedom. In my native US context, both domestic and international security policy is justified on the basis See e.g. Augustine, UWJ, 1.57. Importantly, the refusal to correlate sin with blame when speaking theologically does not preclude that in the context of civil society harmful behaviours should be named, proscribed and restrained. For example, I may recognize that a paedophile is himself a survivor of abuse, and thus that his will is to a significant extent ‘bound’, and still affirm that he should be imprisoned. To do so is to recognize the difference between sin (a theological category) and crime (a social one): sin is to be forgiven; crimes are rightly subject to punishment.

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of the need to ‘defend our freedoms’, and politicians from left to right have no more potent means of motivating constituents than by identifying a threat to freedom. In the economic sphere, too, freedom is the cornerstone of policy and practice: the freedom to dispose of one’s own property apart from any external interference is sacrosanct, and the ability of the individual consumer to select one product over another in the marketplace is regarded as the most tangible proof and exercise of human freedom. Within this context, to be human is to be free, and to be free is pre-eminently to be able to choose: to decide among a range of options without any constraint. Underlying this perspective is an anthropology in which the individual is understood as maximally able to live the life she wishes, but also maximally responsible for the choices she makes – because our freedom means that there is no excuse for poor choices. We make our own beds and must lie in them. To suggest otherwise is to throw our freedom – and thus our humanity – into doubt. The doctrine of original sin presents human beings with a very different picture of what it means to be free. Of course, even a fairly superficial examination of human life reveals that my freedom is limited, in that there are all manner of things that I do not and cannot choose. I do not choose to be born, nor do I choose the basic circumstances (whether of nature or nurture) that shape my life from the moment of my birth. I do not choose to sweat, to be afraid, to fall in love, or to have faith. Yet given that I most certainly can choose to end my life, to alter my physical appearance, to move from city to country, to face my fears, to behave generously toward others, and to pray, it remains possible to conceive one’s agency as remarkably potent: marked in its finitude by certain unavoidable constraints, but nevertheless characterized by a fundamental posture of control. The doctrine of original sin challenges this conception of human agency. It is not just that our exercise of freedom is limited by facts of finitude against which we struggle in vain; rather, we are profoundly alienated from God – and, therefore, from ourselves – in a way that exceeds our capacity not only to address but even to perceive. The gospel proclaims that we are beloved and affirmed by God in spite of this perversion, but in so doing it teaches that our value does not lie in our capacity to choose one particular course of action over another, but rather in the fact – over which we have no control whatever – that we have been chosen. Does this mean that our freedom is an illusion? Yes, if ‘freedom’ means the capacity to choose our destiny after the manner of the consumer, sovereignly surveying good and evil as we would different brands of mouthwash. The doctrine of original sin teaches that we exercise no such sovereignty, but that



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we are instead oriented from birth toward that which cannot give life and thus – albeit in a dizzying variety of ways – turns us toward the nullity of sin and death. And yet this doctrine also challenges us to question whether freedom of the will is best conceived as freedom of choice in the first place. After all, Christians have traditionally not wanted to say that God is good because God chooses the good over evil; instead, they have taught that God is incapable of willing evil. And yet they have not concluded from this incapacity that God is not free. On the contrary, they have affirmed that God exemplifies freedom, understood not as a capacity to choose between options, but rather as the willing and unhindered enactment of God’s own life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In this latter sense the doctrine of original sin is perfectly compatible with the assertion of human freedom. To affirm the doctrine is certainly not to deny that we make choices. It does not even deny that we choose freely, in the sense that our actions are willed by us as agents and are not matters of compulsion. But it does call into question our capacity to live by our choices. The doctrine asserts a paradox: that we sin always and inevitably, and yet that we sin freely; that our wills our bound to sin, and yet nevertheless that the willing by which we sin (precisely as willing) is ineluctably ours and thus confirms our status as free and responsible agents. It teaches that we are free, and yet that apart from grace our freedom profits us nothing, because it drives us – freely! – to delight in things that do not profit. It was obvious to Augustine that our lives are shaped by our choices, and that our choices are never (and, in fact, are incapable of being) compelled. But – and in sharp contrast to the logic of contemporary consumerism – it was also his conviction (as it has been of his theological heirs in both Catholic and Protestant traditions) that for fallen human beings this process of choosing generates slavery rather than freedom and, ultimately, damnation rather than salvation. God has made us to live as free beings in that we enact our own lives, but so long as we are in captivity to original sin, we live them toward destruction. And yet to conclude that the doctrine of original sin is grounds for theological pessimism, as though it were the primary or fundamental truth of human existence, is from an Augustinian perspective a profound mistake. The primary truth of human existence is that God has chosen us from before the foundation of the world to live in communion with God, participating in the love that God is (see 2 Pet. 1.4; 1 Jn 4.8, 16). The fact that we have been so chosen means that this destiny is a gift: even as our existence as creatures is due entirely to God’s grace without any merit on our part, so the fulfilment of our creaturely existence is also a matter of grace, given not because but in spite of

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our merits. The conviction that we all need this gift – that apart from grace we can only plunge toward the abyss – is the basis for the doctrine of original sin. But it is part of the logic of the doctrine that it can be affirmed faithfully only in hindsight, as a confession of a possibility that has been negated, a peril that has been checked, a threat that has already been defeated. To know original sin is to know that our freedom lies neither in the totalitarian fantasy of total control nor in the nightmare of compulsive and unwitting self-destruction, but rather in the glorious freedom of the children of God, who by grace are permitted to enact their lives as a gift, willingly and unhindered. The doctrine of original sin is thus in itself no part of the Christian gospel; but it serves the gospel by reminding us (in the words of H. Richard Niebuhr) that ‘all our good is other than we thought’,16 and that to discern it we must proceed in a spirit of patience, gentleness, and vigilance, knowing that though our incapacity is deep, the grace of Christ is deeper still, and its power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12.9).

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), p. 99.

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Divine Providence Thomas H. McCall

Introduction John of Damascus says that divine providence is ‘the care that God takes over existing things’.1 God creates from his abundant and inexhaustible goodness, and he creates to share that goodness. Having created, God does not abandon that good creation or leave it to itself. Instead, God cares for it through his providential activity. The doctrine of divine providence is thus very closely related to the doctrine of creation. God is ‘both Creator and Provider, and his creative and preserving and providing power is simply his good-will’.2 The doctrine of divine providence is, however, also distinct from the doctrine of creation. While both God’s creative and providential actions are grounded in God’s primordial goodness – as the Damascene says, ‘God alone is good and wise by nature; since he is good, he provides’ – divine providential action is distinct in several important ways.3 What the Damascene says is broadly representative of classical Christian accounts of providence. Richard A. Muller summarizes the doctrine as it developed in scholasticism as ‘the continuing act of divine power, subsequent to the act of creation, by means of which God preserves all things in being, supports their actions, governs them according to his established order, and directs them to their ordained ends’.4 The doctrine of providence has often been

John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa 2:29, PG 44.964A; John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in W. Sanday (ed.), S. D. F. Salmond (trans.), Hilary of Poitiers, John Damascus, vol. 9 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885, reprint Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), p. 41. 2 John of Damascus, De Fide 2.29, PG 44:964B; John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (NPNF 9:41). 3 John of Damascus, De Fide 2.29, PG 44:964B; John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (NPNF 9:41). 4 Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, Drawn Principally From Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1985), p. 251. 1

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considered under three broad divisions: preservation or conservation (conservatio), concurrence (concursus), and government (gubernatio). Conservatio – preservation, sustenance, or conservation – ‘refers to the maintenance of the esse, or being, of contingent things’.5 Although God does not re-create the world ex nihilo moment by moment, contingent entities would not continue to exist from one moment to another without his sustenance. Concursus refers to the fact that God not only continues to sustain his creation but also grants creatures the abilities and powers to be able to perform actions and to do things. Gubernatio refers to God’s governance over his creation; although it is ontologically distinct from him and stands in a contingent and dependent relation upon him, nonetheless God is sovereign over and responsible for the created order. Nothing in creation escapes his notice, nothing in creation falls outside the scope of his authority, and nothing in creation threatens his sovereign reign over it. These elements are central to historic accounts of the doctrine of providence; indeed, they may safely be said to be at the very core of the classical account. What is the relation of this historic doctrine to Christian understandings of sin? Sin is moral evil (we are not talking here of ‘natural evil’, although the relationship between ‘moral evil’ and what we sometimes take to be ‘natural evil’ may indeed be very complex). Sin is the violation of the absolute norms that are established by God in perfect concord with the divine nature. Sin results in the spoilage of God’s good creation and in the destruction of God’s fragile and precious creatures; it is the ‘vandalism of shalom’.6 Sin is, in classical Christian terms, rightly understood as contra naturem and contra rationem – it is always ‘against nature’ or what is truly natural as coming from the goodness of God, and it is always ‘against reason’. Pressing further, sin is always – and ultimately – contra Deum. Indeed, it is against reason and against nature because it is against God: as Thomas Aquinas puts it, ‘the order of nature comes from God himself, wherefore a person does an injustice to God in the act of violating nature: fit iniuria ipsi Deo, ordinatori naturae’. 7 Sin is against God – it violates God’s law, it is opposed to God’s will, and it contradicts God’s nature. Thinking of these doctrines together (as systematic theology must do) raises some interesting questions. It also prompts some troublesome worries. Muller, Dictionary, p. 252. See Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way Its Supposed To Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1994). 7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II–II, q. 154, a. 12. All citations from the Summa Theologica are taken from the English edition translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948). Cited in Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), p. 49. 5 6



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If all creatures – including, of course, all wicked creatures who commit vicious actions – depend upon God moment-by-moment for their existence, why does not God simply cease to sustain or preserve them when they sin? And what of concursus? Does this mean that God really concurs with their sinful actions; does God agree with such wickedness or give his assent to it? Does this mean that God somehow cooperates with their sin? Does God make their sinful actions successful? What are we to make of God’s relation to sin in light of claims about God’s gubernatio? If we take these important affirmations of God’s sovereignty to equate or entail determinism, then how is it possible that sin is really contra Deum? In other words, if we understand divine governance to mean that God determines all creaturely (and indeed all mundane) actions in accordance with the divine will, then what could it possibly mean to say that sin is the violation of God’s will and is opposed to God’s intentions for his creation? In what follows, I shall explore the relation between divine providence and human sin. After making some crucial theological affirmations, we will then be in a position to see what doctrinal options can be eliminated, and we will be able to see what can and should be believed about the relation of divine providence to human sin.

Some Central Theological Affirmations In any discussion of divine providence and human sinfulness, several points stand out as theologically non-negotiable.

Human responsibility for sin The first of these affirmations is straightforward: biblically and theologically, humans are responsible for human sin. As C. S. Lewis reminds us, it is humans, ‘not God, who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs’.8 Human persons are guilty for their sin. They cannot blame their sin on anyone or anything else; they cannot say ‘the devil made me do it’, and they dare not say that ‘God made me do it’ (or ‘God made the devil make me do it’). D. A. Carson has demonstrated that Scripture attests to the reality of human moral responsibility in many ways: we see it in the sincerity and urgency of C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain: How Human Suffering Raises Almost Intolerable Intellectual Problems (New York: Macmillan Books, 1962), p. 89.

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divine commands and exhortations in Scripture; in the historical depictions of persons who are rewarded for their choices as well as in the stories of those who rebel against God and his commands; in the unpleasant but undeniable fact that rebellious sinners are under the judgement of God and face his just wrath; and in the fact that humans are, again and again, held responsible to respond rightly to the divine entreaties and commands to repent, believe and obey.9 As he says, such promises, invitations, entreaties and commands ‘have bite precisely because they can be obeyed or disobeyed’.10 Human responsibility for human sin is uncomfortably plain and obvious in Scripture, and there simply is no doctrine of sin without it. Accordingly, any doctrinal formulation that would ignore (or that would entail the negation of) moral responsibility must be doomed to fail.

Divine goodness Similarly, the goodness of God is made plain in Scripture, and it is absolutely bedrock for classical Christian theology. As Carson puts it: the Bible insists again and again on God’s unblemished goodness. God is never presented as an accomplice of evil, or as secretly malicious … ‘He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he’ (Deut. 32.4). ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all’ (1 Jn 1.5). It is precisely because of this that Habbakuk can say to God, ‘Your eyes are too good to look upon evil; you can tolerate no wrongdoing’ (Hab. 1.13), that he has a difficult time understanding how God can sanction the terrible devastations of the Chaldeans upon his own covenant community. Note then, that the goodness of God is an assumption, the nonnegotiable.11

The goodness of God is nonnegotiable because God is necessarily good. ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’ None at all. And ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4.16). God is not merely loving toward his creatures (although he is that, of course); God’s loving goodness is in no way an arbitrary or capricious love. To the contrary, God is love in the richness and fullness of the Triune communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Holy love is, then, of the essence of the Triune God. As David Bentley Hart reminds us: ‘the Christian metaphysical tradition, in both the Orthodox East and the Catholic West, asserts that God is D. A Carson, Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Perspectives in Tension (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), pp. 24–35. 10 D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), p. 181. 11 D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?, p. 182. 9



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not only good but goodness itself, not only true and beautiful but infinite truth and beauty … thus everything that comes from God must be good and true and beautiful.’12 So God’s goodness is not ephemeral or fleeting – nor is it even possibly so. God is, within the Triune life of transcendent light and holy love that is given and received between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, simply good. The Triune God is perfectly good, unalterably good, unfailingly good. Accordingly, any doctrinal formulation that has as an entailment the conclusion that God performs evil actions or is supportive of evil activity is simply doomed to fail.

Divine sovereignty The supreme authority or sovereignty of God is also unmistakable in Scripture, and it too has been affirmed throughout the Christian theological tradition. God is omniscient, and nothing escapes his watch or care. God is just and holy, and no sin is too petty or trivial to escape his concern and wrath. God is omnipotent, and his authority is as boundless as his power, and no sin is too challenging or overwhelming for him. God is sovereign – God has authority over, and is responsible for – God’s own good but finite and now fallen creation. God is not threatened by human sin, and neither is God complacent about it or its effects. God is the sovereign judge, and he promises to judge the world in righteousness. Moreover, Scripture portrays God as actively working in human history to use actions of human wickedness to achieve his own good purposes. Consider the famous scene in the story of Joseph and his brothers that unfolds late in the life of Joseph. At the culmination of the story, Joseph reveals his identity to the brothers who mistreated him and sold him into slavery to the Egyptians. Although they are afraid of this abused brother who is now a powerful Egyptian official, he asks them to ‘come close’ (Gen. 45.4). He then displays a remarkable conviction about God’s presence and action through this time: ‘it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you’ (Gen. 45.5). After their father dies, the brothers are once again afraid of Joseph. In a stunning reversal of fortunes, they throw themselves down before him and offer to be his slaves. Again, his response is telling: ‘you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives’ (Gen. 50.20). There is no sense in which the Genesis account presents the shameful treatment David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005), pp. 54–5.

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of Joseph by his brothers as anything other than wrong – even outrageously wrong. And yet the narrative also points to God’s providential actions in and through this set of events. What the brothers did was wrong, and we can only judge it as sin. But God was not absent; neither was God inactive or merely reactive. To the contrary, Joseph is convinced that God intended to use their sinful actions for the greater good of God’s own beneficent purposes. And, clearly, God is successful in doing so: they committed these evil deeds with shameful intentions, but God worked to turn their evil actions for a greater good. As another example, consider what must be, for Christians, the central and most decisive turning point of all human history: the betrayal, arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The earliest apostolic preaching of the cross insists that the death of Christ was the result of the sinful actions of the very sinners Christ came to save. There is no ambiguity about it: again and again, the gospel proclamation insists that ‘you killed him’ (e.g. Acts 2.23). And it draws a sharp contrast between the actions of the sinful humans who are responsible for the death of Jesus and the actions of God: ‘you killed him’ – ‘but God raised him from the dead’ (e.g. Acts 2.24; 3.13-15; 4.10; 5.30; 10.39-40; 13.30). The earliest Christian preachers do not say that God killed Jesus; to the contrary, the responsibility for the death of Christ clearly falls upon sinful humanity. At the same time, however, in the early apostolic preaching there is no indication that this was in any way a senseless accident or unforeseen tragedy. To the contrary, this proclamation of the gospel includes the affirmation that this was within the providence of the omniscient God. Jesus Christ was ‘delivered over’ according to ‘God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge’ (Acts 2.23). ‘Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen’ (Acts 4.27-28). Clearly, then, God is sovereign over these events: God is sovereign in the sense that he is supremely authoritative and will judge human sinners for their sins, and God is sovereign in the sense that not even the death of Christ is outside of God’s providential and redemptive purposes.

Some Notable but Failed Attempts at Doctrinal Formulation These are key elements of any theologically acceptable account of human sin and divine providence. Neither commitment to the reality of human moral



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responsibility for sin, on one hand, or steadfast belief in either the unalterable goodness and unshakeable sovereignty of God, on the other hand, can be surrendered. However, some attempts at theological formulation run into problems in light of these theological desiderata. Here are some of the more prominent.

From omnicausality to monocausality Huldrych Zwingli, the prominent sixteenth-century Reformed theologian from Zurich, insists that nothing happens by chance. Then Zwingli goes further. He is a theological determinist: God determines all events and actions. God decides what will be done in creation, and everything that happens does so in exact accordance with God’s will. Beyond this, he says that God is the cause of everything that happens. Going further yet, he also says that God is the only cause of everything that happens. So for Zwingli, it is not enough to say that God is the cause of everything that happens; he also says that ‘other things are not truly causes any more than the representative of the potentate is truly the potentate’.13 This means that ‘there can be but one cause’.14 Accordingly, ‘secondary causes are not properly called causes’, and ‘this is of fundamental importance for the understanding of providence’.15 Zwingli goes on to say that God is the ‘only real cause of all things, and those nearer things which we call causes, are not properly causes, but the agents and instruments with which the eternal mind works, and in which it manifests itself to be enjoyed’.16 This means – and Zwingli recognizes that this means – that God is the author of what we must call sin. As he puts it: ‘the Deity is himself the author of that which to us is unrighteousness, though not so in the least so to him.’17 Zwingli is clearly taking leave of (a great deal of) the Christian tradition here. Compare John of Damascus (who is representative of much classical theology on this point): ‘We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand, yet he does not predetermine all things. For he knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but he does not predetermine them. For it is not his will that there should be wickedness nor does he choose to compel virtue.’18 Huldrych Zwingli, ‘The Providence of God’, in Samuel Macauley Jackson (ed.), On Providence and Other Essays (Durham: The Labyrinth Press, 1983 [1922]), p. 154; for the Latin text, see Opera D. Huldrych Zwingli (Zurich: 1545), p. 358b. 14 Zwingli, ‘The Providence’, p. 157; Opera, p. 359a. 15 Zwingli, ‘The Providence’, p. 138; Opera, p. 354b. 16 Zwingli, ‘The Providence’, pp. 157–8; Opera, p. 359b. 17 Zwingli, ‘The Providence’, p. 176; Opera, p. 364a. 18 John of Damascus, De Fide II:XXX, PG 44:972A; NPNF IX, p. 42. 13

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Or compare Aquinas’ claim that divine providence does not impose necessity upon everything.19 Or, as he puts it: ‘God cannot be directly the cause of sin, either in himself or in another … it is impossible that he should be either to himself or to another the cause of departing from the order which is to himself. Therefore he cannot be directly the cause of sin, [and] in like manner neither can he cause sin indirectly.’20 John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas takes this view for good reason, and they have resources to avoid the problems associated with Zwingli’s view. And Zwingli’s position indeed does run into several problems. Recall our critical theological desiderata: divine sovereignty, human responsibility, and divine goodness. Zwingli’s account clearly and resoundingly affirms divine sovereignty. But when we come to moral responsibility, trouble looms large. A bit of reflection shows us that there is good reason to think that divine determinism might undermine a robust account of moral responsibility. For surely we do not bear moral responsibility for events over which we have no causal control. But if determinism is true and events over which we have no causal control and for which we bear no moral responsibility entail (along with the relevant natural or causal laws) the performance of all of our actions, then we have good reason to doubt that we bear moral responsibility for those actions.21 These issues are, of course, vexed, and the debates over freedom and responsibility continue.22 But it is obvious that there is trouble in the neighbourhood. But things get much worse when we consider divine goodness. For Zwingli’s doctrine threatens to make God the author of evil. Without a distinction between primary and secondary causality (which Zwingli does not have), it is hard indeed to defuse this threat. If God is the cause of sin, then isn’t God just doing sinful things? Isn’t he just committing sin? As we have seen, Zwingli actually says that ‘the Deity is himself the author of that which to us is unrighteousness, though not in the least so to him’.23 But apart from Zwingli’s sheer assertion that this isn’t sin for God (even though he admits that it would be so Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 22, a. 4. Aquinas, ST I, q. 79, a. 1. Here I follow the helpful summary of Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 28–9. As he lays it out, letting MR stand for moral responsibility, E stand for a set of events of which I have no causal control, and A for my action, we can see that (1) ~MR(E) and (2) ~MR (E=>A) entail (3) ~MR(A). 22 A fine entry point into such debates can be found in Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 23 Zwingli, ‘The Providence’, p. 176; Opera, p. 364a. 19 20 21



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for anyone else), isn’t God the cooperative sinner – does not this reduce God to being a co-sinner? Worse yet, if God is the only cause of sinful actions, then how are we to avoid the conclusion that God is the only sinner? The Zwinglian defender might protest that, like it or not, Scripture teaches both divine omnicausality and monocausality. She might point to biblical texts where God is saying ‘I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things’ (Isa. 45.7) or ‘when disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?’ (Amos 3.6). And she might make a case that such passages teach divine causation of all things, even evil. However, a closer analysis shows that such texts do no such thing. As Aquinas explains, ‘the order of justice belongs to the order of the universe’ (and as such it is a reflection of the necessary goodness of God).24 The order of justice ‘requires that penalty should be dealt out to sinners.’25 This penalty may be called ‘evil’ (in the sense that it seems awful to the recipients of it, and indeed it may be a freely chosen sinful action of other sinners that God uses for his good and just purposes). Thus God is not, Aquinas insists, ‘the author of evil’, and ‘the evil which consists in defect of action, or which is caused by the defect of the agent, is not reduced to God as its cause’.26

From monocausality to occasionalism Zwingli’s bold and unguarded assertions (without the standard qualifications about the distinctions between primary and secondary causes) about God’s universal causality create problems, and his claims about God being the sole causal agent only make things worse. Indeed, his position brings us to consideration of occasionalism. Occasionalism is a radical view of divine agency that was championed by such medieval theologians as al-Ghazali and Gabriel Biel as well as such major modern figures as Nicholas Malebranche, Bishop George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards. In general, occasionalism holds that the cosmos is being re-created ex nihilo moment-by-moment. God is thus the ‘strong active cause’ of every event that occurs, and no material substances have any causal powers whatsoever (either active or passive).27 For a theologian such as Edwards, then, it turns out that ‘God is the sole causal agent, that is, the Aquinas, ST I, 1. 49, a. 2. Aquinas, ST I, 1. 49, a. 2. 26 Aquinas, ST I, 1. 49, a. 2. 27 Here I rely upon Alfred J. Freddoso, ‘Medieval Aristotelianism and the Case Against Secondary Causation in Nature’, in Thomas V. Morris (ed.), Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 74–118. 24 25

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efficient cause of all that comes to pass’.28 And, given human sin, ‘God is the causal and moral agent responsible for … sinful actions’.29 But if the Zwinglian view has problems, this Edwardsian position only serves to deepen them. The familiar problems with moral responsibility emerge again, and this time with even more of a vengeance. If human creatures have no causal power at all (either active or passive), then it isn’t so much as possible for them to freely choose to sin. But oddly enough, neither is it possible for them to resist the ‘sinful’ actions that move through them. And, again, God is the all-determining agent of sinful actions; so it turns out that God is the ultimate causal agent who is responsible for sin. Somehow, things get even worse. For now – as the only causal agent – God is the only sinner. These implications are outrageous. Indeed, they are blasphemous.

Deism The devout efforts of extreme theological determinists (such as Zwingli and Edwards) undermine human responsibility and implicate God in sinful actions, but there are problems from the other direction as well. For instance, Deism (as broadly represented by such Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment luminaries as Herbert of Cherbury, Matthew Toland, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, Matthew Tindal, Peter Annet, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as their more notorious French counterparts) seriously attenuates divine action. In the summary of Alan Charles Kors: ‘Deism was the categorical naturalization of divine providence.’30 Deism allows that the initial act of creation was a supernatural act, but beyond that divine providential action is limited to natural law (that is, in principle, discoverable by everyone). Moreover, Kors says: ‘Deism also posited a categorically general providence, excluding acts of particular providence such as supernatural revelation, miracle, answered prayer, divine intervention, and particular relationship to God.’31 Such views amount to a serious revision of the classical doctrinal affirmations about concurrence and governance. The latter gets reduced to the presence of the laws of nature, and the former seems to drop from sight altogether. In Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 144. 29 Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Original Sin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 71. 30 Alan Charles Kors, ‘Deism’, in Chad Meister and James Beilby (eds), The Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Thought (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 326. 31 Kors, ‘Deism’, p. 329. 28



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addition, there is no room in such revisionist accounts for the kind of divine engagement (both indirect, as in the case of the events leading to Christ’s passion, which were ‘according to the plan and foreknowledge of God’, and direct, as in the case of the miracle of Christ’s passion) that we see portrayed in Scripture. So while the theological desideratum of human moral responsibility is not necessarily threatened by deistic doctrine, it is not hard to see that deistic accounts of providence fall far short of the other crucial desiderata. For divine sovereignty is emptied of its biblically grounded content, and serious questions are raised about divine goodness.

Process theology Process theology goes even further in some important ways. In contrast to Deism, it affirms divine engagement – even to the point of divine entanglement. But it works to do so without recourse to supernaturalism; indeed it sharply criticizes and categorically rejects ‘classical theism’.32 Process theology emphasizes several key concepts; not surprisingly, the notion of process is chief among them. As John Cobb and David Ray Griffin explain, to be actual just is to be in process, and the only things that count as actual entities are ‘momentary events which perish immediately upon coming into being’.33 These momentary events do not ‘endure through time’.34 This means that ‘true individuals are momentary experiences’, and ‘what we ordinarily call individuals, the sorts of things that endure through time, are not true individuals, but are “societies” of such’.35 Everything is, then, ‘essentially related’ and interdependent.36 This last claim encompasses God too; God is to be understood as the ‘Creative-Responsive Love’ that enjoys its own cosmic adventure while luring and persuading the cosmos into evolution toward greater harmony and enjoyment. Process theology is a complex and evolving entity itself, but it is not hard to see that problems arise for process theology when we consider our primary theological desiderata. In relation to divine sovereignty, even brief reflection shows that process theology falls far short. If God is limited in knowledge and cannot know what free creatures will do in the future, then it is hard indeed to E.g. David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalisn: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 33 John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), p. 14. 34 Ibid., p. 19. 35 Ibid., p. 15. 36 Ibid., pp. 18–22. 32

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account for the scriptural claim that the death of Christ was according to ‘God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge’ (Acts 2.23). To be fair, process theology thinks that the doctrine of divine omnipotence is a ‘mistake’, and it criticizes and rejects the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.37 But even if process theology is willing to reject the desideratum of divine sovereignty (and, in this case, the direct witness of Scripture to the divine ‘plan and foreknowledge’), the other criteria will be harder for it to discard. These desiderata, however, will also be hard to maintain. Consider moral responsibility as it relates to their view of personal identity. As we have seen, process ontology holds that actual entities are momentary events that do not endure through time, and that personal human experience is merely a string or ‘serially ordered society’ of such events.38 But a problem rears its head at this point: if actual entities do not endure through time, then they do not endure long enough to commit acts of wrong-doing. They do not last long enough to acquire the property of being guilty for sin.39 Perhaps surprisingly, things get worse when we think about divine goodness. Process theology insists that God, as powerful but not omnipotent, is doing his best to combat evil in the world. Accordingly, God is ‘responsible’ for the evil but not ‘indictable’ for it (as he presumably would be if he were not fighting against it).40 But there are serious concerns here. According to process theology it is true that God understood that the final triumph of evil was possible but then created nonetheless. But if God does this without knowing that he will ultimately triumph, then he was gambling that he wouldn’t create a monster that would defeat him and destroy the cosmos. And this means that God was operating in a dangerously reckless way. As Stephen T. Davis argues, the deity of process theology is like a ‘mad scientist who fashions a monster whom the scientist hopes will behave but whom he cannot control. If the monster runs amok, the scientist’s decision to make the monster will turn out to have been terribly wrong.’41 Surely this casts a long shadow over the goodness of God.

E.g. Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), and Thomas Jay Oord (ed.), Theologies of Creation: Creatio Ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals (New York: Routledge, 2015). 38 Cobb and Griffin, Process Theology, p. 15. 39 If we interpret process metaphysics to hold that these events in fact do endure through time and thus serve as property-bearers, then we might avoid this problem. At the same time, it is worth noting that we have reintroduced substance metaphysics (albeit an odd version thereof) once again. On this see Stephen T. Davis, Disputed Issues: Contending for Christian Faith in Today’s Academic Setting (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 127–8. 40 Cobb and Griffin, Process Theology, p. 69. 41 Davis, Disputed Issues, p. 131. 37



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The Traditional Doctrine Once More Having cleared this conceptual brush, let us return to the core elements of the more traditional accounts of divine providence. There are, of course, various versions of the broadly traditional accounts, with Molinism and Thomism taking pride of place in most discussions.42 But what they generally hold in common is a strong commitment to the primary theological desiderata along with affirmation of conservation, concurrence and governance.

Conservation The traditional doctrine of providence holds that God conserves, sustains, or upholds his creation in existence; were it not for divine providence, creation in general and all creatures in particular would cease to exist. Eleonore Stump explains that for Aquinas, ‘the notion of God’s providence is derived from the concept of his goodness’.43 God sustains for the same reason that God creates: to share the goodness that is essential to his nature. Stump explains further that this goodness is not something extrinsic to God, nor is it arbitrary in any way: Because on the doctrine of simplicity the divine nature is identical with goodness, the goodness of creatures is measured by their relationship with God. For human persons in particular, the ultimate good and the final fulfilment of their natures consists in union with God. And because God is good, he does what is good for his creatures. In his dealings with human beings, then, God’s ultimate aim, which takes precedence over all others, is to return human beings to himself, to unite them to him in heaven.44

So God’s very act of continued sustenance of his creation – even in its sinful state – is demonstration of his good intentions for it. Indeed, the fact that sinful creatures continue to exist is testimony to the goodness of God’s providence.

For recent work on Molinism, see especially Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); William Lane Craig, ‘God Directs All Things’, in Dennis W. Jowers (ed.), Four Views On Divine Providence (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), pp. 79–100; Ken Perszyk (ed.), Molinism: The Contemporary Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). On Thomist accounts of divine providence, see e.g. Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 455–78 and Alexander R. Pruss, ‘Prophecy Without Middle Knowledge’, Faith and Philosophy (2007): 433–57. 43 Stump, Aquinas, p. 456. 44 Ibid. 42

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Concurrence Matters are not, however, quite so straightforward when we consider concurrence in relation to sin. Consider the range of possible understandings (and misunderstandings) of what it might mean for God to ‘concur’ with sinful actions. At a quite basic level, concurrence might be taken in the sense of provision; this is very closely related to sustenance. For in the very act of sustaining creatures with causal powers, God is continuing to provide them with those causal powers and thus enabling them to perform various actions. God does not determine what they do with those powers, but he continues both to sustain them in existence and to give them the ability to do things. Let us call this the provision sense of concurrence. There is also what we might call the dual agency sense of concurrence; here ‘to concur’ means something ‘to cooperate’ in working together, as in the father who is talking to the elderly widowed neighbour with his teenage son and tells the neighbour that ‘we will take care of the snow removal for you this winter’. Here he means something like this: ‘my son and I will work together to shovel your snow; we will combine our powers and cooperate for this end.’ This is distinct from what we might call the replacement sense of concurrence; this sense is much closer to the speech-act of the father who tells his elderly widowed neighbour that ‘we will take care of the snow removal’ but who really means that only the son will do the work involved in snow removal. The father clearly intends for the neighbour’s snow to be cleared, but he just as clearly intends for the son to do the hard work instead of him. Finally, concurrence might be taken rather generally as agreement, as when someone says, ‘I insist that we do X’ and another person nods gravely and says, ‘I concur’. Accordingly, ‘to concur’ would then mean ‘to agree’ or ‘to approve’. We can call this the approval sense of concurrence. Taking these in reverse order, we don’t have to reflect on this for long to see that the approval sense of concurrence cannot be correct. Without serious qualification, we should never affirm this. Given our affirmations about divine goodness (which should be non-negotiable for orthodox Christian theology), any view according to which God nods in agreement and says ‘I approve’ of rape and torture is simply a non-starter. Returning to our biblical examples, surely it is true that God says ‘I approve’ of the ways that he will use the perfidy of Joseph’s brothers and the malfeasance of Jesus’ co-conspirators for his own good purposes (in these cases, to save many lives and to redeem the world), but this doesn’t mean that he approves of their sinful actions. Indeed, given the



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necessary and simple goodness of God’s own Triune life of holy love, divine approval of sin is nothing short of impossible. Similarly, to understand concurrence in the replacement sense is surely mistaken. If we take this to mean that divine action replaces the causal efficacy of the human agency, then we are right back to the doorstep of occasionalism. And, as we have seen, this entails not only that God is a sinner but even that God is the only real sinner. Since any doctrinal proposal that entails blasphemy can be safely dismissed, we can reject this proposal. On the other hand, to take the replacement in the other direction is not much better. For if all divine agency is reduced to mere directives, and to the point where human agency is the only agency that is causally efficacious, then we have returned to the doorstep of deism. The dual agency sense of concurrence is more promising; indeed, Scripture will sometimes speak of both God and a human sinner as the cause of some action (e.g. God ‘hardens’ Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh ‘hardens’ his own heart). But caution is in order here, especially when we do not consider providence in abstraction but precisely in relation to sin. Worries come from several directions. Some theologians, especially those attuned to the resources of the Christian tradition, will criticize this account for placing the causal agency of the divine and the human on the same ontological plane, with the result being that God and the human(s) are simply dividing up the workload while cooperating at the same level. In other words, they might say, to think of dual agency in this way is to underplay or ignore the important distinctions between primary and secondary causality. Moreover, this sense may open the door to other misunderstandings. Some might adopt the dual agency sense and then go on to explain it in a determinist sense; on this proposal; on this view, perhaps God would be doing everything through his creatures by making it impossible to do anything other than they do. But then we would again invite the familiar criticisms of determinism. For we would once again be faced with arguments that the moral responsibility of the human agents is mitigated or negated – and at the same time we would encounter the arguments that dual agency in sinful actions would make God a co-sinner. So however we take claims about dual agency, the claim cannot plausibly be taken to mean that. The provision sense of concurrence seems to be on more solid ground. We might wonder why God sustains sinful creatures at all, or we might at least question why he continues to grant causal powers to them when he knows that they will misuse those powers. This worry could be taken in either of two ways: we might wonder why he doesn’t remove all ability to do things by sinners,

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or we might question why God doesn’t remove more of them than he in fact does (because, for Christians who believe in miracles, it seems clear enough that sometimes God does just this). If we take it the first way and want to know why anything bad ever happens, we should remember that the overall Christian account gives us reason to believe that the world that God wanted was a good world with creatures who would freely relate to the Trinity in a relationship of holy and loving communion. As Lewis puts it: We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by his creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions are impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void … That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.45

If, on the other hand, we take the complaint in the second sense, we have recourse to ‘skeptical theism’: just because we cannot, from our limited vantage point, see why God might have good and holy and just reasons to allow particular horrors and evils does not give us a good reason to conclude that there are no such good and holy and just reasons.46 However, the traditional accounts of concurrence are rather more complicated. The provision sense of concurrence is generally seen as deficient; for many theologians, it just does not go far enough. As Freddoso puts it: ‘traditional philosophical theologians almost unanimously regarded as too weak even the strong-sounding (to modern ears) claim that God’s causal contribution to non-miraculous natural effects consists precisely in his creating and conserving material substances and their causal powers.’47 The scholastics disagreed among themselves over the precise nature of the way that divine action made causal contributions (whether God contributes to the secondary cause or to the effect, etc.), but they agreed that God is sovereign over the causes that come together to produce an effect. Moreover, they generally insisted on the important distinction Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pp. 33–4. For defences of ‘skeptical theism’, see Michael Bergmann, ‘Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil’, in Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 374–99, and Michael C. Rea, ‘Skeptical Theism and the “Too Much Skepticism” Objection’, in Justin P. McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), pp. 482–505. 47 Freddoso, ‘Medieval Aristotelianism’, pp. 117–18, emphasis original. 45 46



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between primary and secondary causality; thus they would have insisted that any notion of dual agency must take this distinction into account. So it seems safe to conclude that they would have insisted upon bolstering the provision sense and providing important nuance to the dual agency sense. It seems just as safe to conclude that (the vast majority of) classical Christian theologians would also have rejected the replacement and approval senses of concurrence.

Governance Turning our attention to governance, we can see that caution is in order here as well. As Hart points out: ‘certainly all Christians must affirm God’s transcendent governance of everything, even fallen history and fallen nature, and must believe that by that governance he will defeat evil and bring the final good of all things out of the darkness of “this age”.’48 Hart is correct; this much is basic to Christian theology. But Hart is also right to observe that: It makes a considerable difference, however – nothing short of our understanding of the nature of God is at stake – whether one says that God has eternally willed the history of sin and death, and all that comes to pass therein, as the proper or necessary means of achieving his ends, or whether one says instead that God has willed his good in creatures from eternity and will bring it to pass, despite their rebellion, by so ordering all things toward his goodness that even evil (which he does not cause) becomes an occasion of the operations of grace.49

Hart concludes that it is only the latter view that ‘can accurately be called a doctrine of ‘providence’ in the properly theological sense; the former view is mere determinism’.50 Keeping our theological desiderata in mind, there is good reason to think that Hart is correct.

Conclusion: The Mysteries of Providence and the Hope of the Gospel How does God ‘so order’ everything so that even sinful actions ‘become an occasion for the operations of grace’? John of Damascus observes that God works in ways that are both mysterious and varied: for instance, sometimes God allows Ibid. Ibid. 50 Ibid. 48 49

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us to encounter misfortune for the sake of our own sanctification and his glory, sometimes it is permitted for the sake of other persons, and at other points God allows evil actions to occur ‘in order that something great and marvelous might be accomplished’ – such as the salvation of humanity as it was brought about through the cross.51 More elaborate theories of how this happens have been proposed, and these hold promise (Molinism is especially fecund). But even if we cannot fully explain the mysterious workings of providence – even if our best attempts at detailed explanation fall somewhat short – this does not entail that there are no good explanations. It means only that we don’t currently have such explanations at hand (and, I think, it may give us reason to wonder if such explanations are even accessible on this side of the eschaton). We are, however, in a good position to avoid mistaken, wrong-headed and pastorally damaging conclusions. And theologically, we are in a position to joyfully affirm that God’s providence flows from his goodness, and, far from being overwhelmed by badness, it is at work to restore sinful and broken creatures to himself.

John of Damascus, De Fide II: XXIX, PG 44:965A–968B, NPNF IX, pp. 41–2.

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Freedom Alistair McFadyen

Introductory Orientations: What is at Stake? Perhaps to many readers the relationship of sin to freedom will seem both obvious and uncomplicated – a theme within hamartiology where very little of significance is at stake (except those of you who have already read the excellent chapter in this volume by Ian McFarland on original sin). Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. How freedom is understood and calibrated in relation to sin is, I shall argue, a decisive factor in determining whether a doctrine of sin is adequate either to the reality of God or to pathologies of the human, which sin-talk attempts to bring to expression. I am going to use this chapter to signpost some of the ways in which freedom is of systematic and methodological significance in the broad ecology of Christian understandings of sin. In doing so, my discussion will gesture frequently towards concerns discussed at greater length in other chapters of this volume. That these gestures are so frequent, that freedom emerges so often in discussions of sin that are so varied in thematic focus, indicates that non-trivial issues in relation to the doctrine of sin are focused – and can therefore be brought to light in discussion of – the theme of freedom. Opposed renderings of the doctrine of sin can often be correlated with divergent understanding of the nature of freedom and the way that it functions in relation to sin. At the same time, these substantive, conceptual differences are likely to be systemic and to reflect and be rooted in differences in theological method. Why is that? Because, ultimately, different ways of defining freedom and construing its relation to sin are rooted in diverging functional doctrines of God in hamartiology. By ‘functional’, I mean to indicate the extent to and the way in which the doctrine of God is allowed to function in relation to the doctrine of sin and not only differences in the substantive position taken. Does the substantive position taken in relation to the doctrine of God make any difference to the doctrine of sin

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or to theological anthropology more broadly? To what extent does the former function as the governing context of the latter? Raising these questions is, of course, in itself a vehicle for a methodological proposal: affording epistemological priority in the doctrine of sin to the doctrine of God. That would make a difference only if what sin actually is (what human beings, salvation, eschatological consummation actually are), is rooted in and not accurately or adequately comprehensible apart from the reality of God. That sin is a theological language should be considered tautological.1 That this grammatical rule is honoured as often in the breach as in the following makes its explicit articulation necessary. The frequent cause of this breach is the essentially non-theological conceptions of the human and of human goingwrongness that (certainly in the West) are culturally dominant (though not culturally unique), and are rooted in a specific construction of human freedom. This is what tempts us to construct accounts of sin that function without active reference to God, that are quite literally ‘free’ of God. And it is this that makes our understanding of freedom of decisive importance in constructing an account of sin that is adequate, both to the reality of God and to humanity that is damaged and damaging.

Freedom and the Moral The extent to which the relationship between sin and freedom might seem both obvious and uncomplicated is likely to reflect the assumption that the language of sin functions as a moral language. As David Attfield puts it revealingly: ‘Sin is a concept parasitic on morality.’2 I say ‘revealingly’, since his statement seems to suggest a more basic concept of the moral that we have access to independently of and prior to our understanding of sin, God and the human shaped by the Christian story of God-with-us and God-for-us, which the category of sin makes use of and to which it conforms. This might best be described as ‘natural morality’, a commonsense, universal (in the sense of tradition- and culturally independent) apprehension of the conditions for the attribution of moral A point I have pressed firmly elsewhere: Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 10f.; Alistair McFadyen, ‘Sins of Praise: The Assault on God’s Freedom’, in God and Freedom, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), pp. 32f. 2 David G. Attfield, ‘The Morality of Sins’, Religious Studies 20 (2) (1984): 227. ‘Parasitic’ seems to me not to be the most helpful of words to denote conceptual dependence. But, in any case, if sin is ‘parasitic’ conceptually on anything, it should surely be our understanding of God. 1

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responsibility, in which freedom – and a particular concept of freedom – plays a pivotal role. Broadly speaking, moral judgement is concerned with acts of wrongdoing in relation to which an agent stands in a particular kind of causal relation; a relation that might be characterized as personal. And what marks the relationship between agent and action as personal – what makes the act our act, an act of our person – is generally held to be the exercise of a particular kind of freedom in relation to the act. That freedom might best be characterized as deliberative self-determination in which there are two essential components. First, deliberation in making choices requires the availability of different objects of choice. Where there is only one possible course of action, no choice is involved and, on this view, the will (understood to be the organ of deliberative choice) is not engaged and the act would be better characterized as one of necessity rather than freedom. This brings us to the second essential component of moral evaluation, making choices that are free and therefore genuinely our own. And what makes the will – and hence the person – free is best expressed as a matter of power: the power to make choices and to act based on nothing other than itself. In a moral register, what makes for a personal relationship to acts, is that, in their commission, we are acting freely: we are their self-determining cause. This self-determination is not a matter of the pure capacity of the will, but of its relative potency. In particular, its potency relative to the determining power of either external conditions or internal drives and desires. We may be neither morally praised nor blamed for acts that are not freely and deliberately chosen, or that could not be avoided, or that are the outcome social or cultural forces, instinctual drives or irresistible desires. Where we are subject to irresistible forces, drives or impulses, our action is not a product of our person; we are not its cause. In a very real sense, such acts are not ours; rather are they mechanical responses to external or internal stimuli which might be described as having overpowered our will. Consequently, on this view, the will is not actively or effectively engaged. Hence, the acts cannot be described as free and they fall outwith the compass of moral evaluation. Moral evaluation concerns itself with action that is freely willed, and we escape moral responsibility where our acts may be shown to be compelled, determined or otherwise unavoidable.3 Freedom here is primarily, therefore, freedom of the will in choosing. On this point, see Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); John M Fischer (ed.), Moral Responsibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law, reprint edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Anthony Kenny, Will, Freedom

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We see here the primary ingredients of the conception of freedom that is the bedrock of a moral frame of reference: choice-making, together with what might be termed transcendence of determining conditions. It is the freedom from determination that secures the freedom – and so it is assumed the personal character – of the choice-making. This is freedom as the autonomy, independence and neutrality of the will, not only in relation to the pressures of external determinants, but pressures internal to the person as well. If the will and its choices are to be free, they cannot be the product of internal attachments, desires and drives, ingrained habits or even personal identity or character. Ultimately, rather, I may only be held responsible for that of which I am the cause; which I could have willed to do otherwise; which is a product of my self-determined choosing and not an outcome of determining conditions, powerful internal drives or the attractive power of objects of choice. In other words, moral culpability works where there is a non-necessary and underdetermined relation between person and action, where deliberative choice is freely enacted.


Sin as a Moral Language This, therefore, is the freedom of autonomy as indeterminacy, the power to make and to follow one’s own law, where the will is determined by nothing other than itself. The guiding assumption here is that the moral subject is free and neutral in relation to the possible objects of moral choice, so that her moral choices may be deemed to be freely made – that is, decisions of internal, deliberative subjectivity, unfettered and undetermined by external factors and relationships, as much as by internal drives and dispositions or any inherent attraction to objects of possible choice. This is the bedrock of moral evaluation and an essential ingredient in the grammar of the moral. What happens to the language of sin if it is made to conform to a moral grammar of this sort? Where sin is correlated with this understanding of freedom, then its focus is on acts and on acts of a particular kind: those characterized by this kind of potent, autonomous agential freedom to choose, where one could have done otherwise. In this act-centred understanding of sin, attention is restricted to acts that are personal in this restricted sense. Such and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975); and Anthony Kenny, Freewill and Responsibility (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Also see William S. Babcock, ‘Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency’, Journal of Religious Ethics 16 (1988): 28.

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a view need not be entirely disinterested in or unable to take account of the influence of sub-personal (e.g. instinct, desire) or supra-personal (e.g. culture, social or economic structures) factors nor yet other aspects of the personal (e.g. character and its embedded habits) that might condition or shape the will. It will, however, restrict its attention to those acts where the freedom of the will resists and survives their influence unaffected and intact. In the end, a framework of moral evaluation concerns itself only with that range of actions where the will retains sufficient freedom from determining factors either to resist them altogether or to freely accept and agree to abide by and act in accordance with them – in which case, they are not strictly determinants of action, rather other objects of choice that happen to stand behind any particular act.4 Whilst it is not essential to such a view, in practice most theologies of sin that function as moral frameworks of this sort tend towards the view that human action is more often characterized by this sort of freedom than not. In other words, they tend to operate a hermeneutic of suspicion against claims that acts are determined by sub-personal or supra-personal structures or processes. Instead, articulations of the doctrine of sin that conform to a moral grammar are likely to see emphasis on, say, the social or cultural or psychological determinants of action as attempts to evade personal responsibility. In that cause, they often find themselves holding the position that, no matter the potency of supraor sub-personal determinants, the will always retains some vestige of freedom; the person is always responsible for their action.5 In part, that is because the will is viewed as always free; therefore, wherever the will is active, we have action attributable to the person as its cause, subject to moral evaluation. In effect, there is a zero-sum between the effective power of the will and the power of all other forces that may be operating on it. Either the will is active – in which case, we have acts that are subject to moral evaluation – or it is overpowered by external or internal determinants of action.6 Such a view is able to take some account, for instance, of the fundamental dispositions of character that might be said to lie behind our choices, but only to the extent that these dispositions are themselves either freely chosen or, if in place already, worked on and developed in a deliberate way. Kant preserved the absoluteness of freedom in relation to the moral agent’s fundamental dispositions underlying actions, so exposing both to moral evaluation, by postulating their free adoption (possibly in a pre-temporal choice). See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 16f., 20, 24, 26f., 33. On the more general point, see also Roger Trigg, ‘Sin and Freedom’, Religious Studies 20 (2) (1984), and Sharon Lamb, The Trouble with Blame (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 5 For example, cf. here the positions of F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), pp. 163–9, 73; Piet Schonenberg, Man and Sin: A Theological View (London: Sheed & Ward, 1965), pp. 104f., 12–18; Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (London: SCM, 1978), p. 57; Trigg, ‘Sin and Freedom’, p. 197. 6 Precisely this framework of moral judgement provoked Pelagius’ concern about the nature and 4

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Such a view receives additional encouragement under the conditions of modernity, where freedom is not merely considered an essential condition of the passing of moral judgement. Freedom enjoys an ontological and metaphysical status as a basic and enduring structure of human existence. It is considered inalienable; it cannot be destroyed or lost in existence.7 In context of the concerns of this volume, sins of the free acts of the will, not only autonomous, but itself not significantly affected either by a previous history of sinning or by larger structures of sin. One of the chief casualties of this emphasis on autonomy and the associated promotion of an individualistic moral frame of reference has been the doctrine of original sin, which achieved dogmatic status only in Western churches. Here, modern critiques and reinterpretations have often more deeply embedded and radicalized Pelagius’ suspicion of and resistance to extending the range of reference of the language of sin to that which is beyond the scope of moral evaluation or that appear to depersonalize sin and guilt, turning both into non-moral categories. In particular, it is the attribution – indeed, the transference – of guilt by natural or metaphysical means, rather than by free, personal action, which is a major sticking point. The traditional construction of original sin seems to include a reference to that which people inherit or otherwise passively receive and are not responsible for as persons – that is, as free moral agents. So where sin functions as a moral language, it is exclusively interested in the locating and tracking of responsibility construed in terms of causal moral culpability (moral blame or juridical guilt). In other words, it is interested in acts of free moral agents; in sins rather than sin as some conditioning substratum or context of action; in culpable breaches of moral law. Consequently, the referential scope of the language of sin is reduced to bad acts; freely committed wrongdoing.8 Behaviour that is the outcome or external expression of overpowering operation of the will in Augustine’s account, first of all of faith in response to grace; subsequently, in his developing doctrine of original sin. In many ways, Pelagius prefigures the understanding of freedom and of sin that is characteristically modern, struggling to see how a will that is subject to superior coercive power – whether that be grace, desire, habit or the determining influence of cultural mores and norms – can be free. And since, for him, the will is always free, acts that are not determined solely by the will overriding and free from all internal and external pressures and forces are not acts of will at all. Shorn of any vestige of internal freedom, they can neither be considered acts of the person nor, therefore, subject to moral evaluation. See Pelagius, Epistle to Demetrias, 16; Pelagius, On the Possibility of Not Sinning, 2, 4; Augustine, On Nature and Grace, 34; Augustine, On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness, 2. 7 See e.g. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 39. 8 For an exceptionally clear example, see Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin, pp. xxiii–xxvi, 20, 63, 67, 93, 104. See also F. R. Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903); F. R. Tennant, The Concept of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912). More recent examples may be found in: Cornelius Plantinga,

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internal or external pressures falls outside of its scope. As, indeed, do the subor supra-personal sources of such pressure. On this basis, the term sin cannot properly be used either of, say, psychological compulsion, cultural conditioning or social structuration or the identities, life-orientations and behaviours that they foster unless they are also at some point freely embraced (by a will that is generally supposed always to retain sufficient freedom to choose otherwise). And behaviour that is determined rather than freely willed cannot be the subject of moral evaluation, of praise or blame, since on this view it is not the person’s own act.

Alternative Contemporary Constructions of Sin Despite the hegemony of this definition of freedom and its central, axiomatic status in modern, Western culture (greatly assisted by a pre-modern association of the image of God with the conditions of human subjectivity, including selfconsciousness, rationality and free will characteristic of deliberative freedom), the reduction of sin to a moral grammar predicated on potent, deliberative autonomy of the will faces a number of significant challenges in contemporary theology. Hamartiology since the latter part of the twentieth century has increasingly been characterized by approaches that, in sometimes very different ways and for different reasons, problematize the restriction of sin-talk to a moral frame of reference. In different ways and with sometimes very different concerns, these theologies of sin offer a more complex and nuanced account of the operation of the will in relation to sin. Consequently, they offer radically different readings of the nature of freedom and its relation to sin. Both together and individually, these theologies of sin provide helpful illustrations of the limitations of a moral frame of reference for hamartiology. At the same time, they offer constructive proposals for moving beyond the constrictions of a moral grammar. Each of these approaches expresses a sense of the inadequacy of a moral frame of reference to do justice to the nature and the depths of the forms of human brokenness, going-wrongness and damage with which they are principally concerned. Each approach can be interpreted as ‘Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin’ Theology Today 50, no. 2 (1993): pp. 184–9; Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 34–8, 43, 51; Bernard Ramm, Offense to Reason: A Theology of Sin (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 90; Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1939), p. 267–6, 401; and of course explicitly following Tennant, Attfield, ‘The Morality of Sins’.

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asking at what level of explanation do human beings and human having-gonewrongness best make sense. In each case, a reduction to autonomous acts of the will is found to be inadequate. With some notable exceptions, the explicit criteria of judgement and interpretation tend to be anthropological rather than theological, concerned primarily with doing justice to the complexity of human situations and behaviour that escape the notice of other (often mainstream) constructions of sin. Cumulatively, they represent significant – if not quite systematic – disquiet with conceptions of sin that privilege the notion of a potent, autonomous will as its necessary and defining element. I can do little more than list thumbnail caricatures of some of the most significant examples, not only because of the restrictions of space here, but also because I wish to move quickly to the theological grounding of the critique of the conception of freedom that functions in moral constructions of the doctrine of sin. In the end, it is explicitly theological conceptions of freedom and of sin that provide the foundation for understanding the anthropological inadequacy of hamartiologies reduced to the moral to give expression to accounts of human wrongness that are sufficiently rich and deep. In all but one case (addiction), readers will find fuller discussion in other chapters of this volume. 1. At the heart of feminist critiques of the tradition’s emphasis on the sin of pride lies a concern to expand the referential range of the doctrine of sin to include modalities of sin that do not involve the possession or exercise of potent freedom of will. What the tradition names as the sin of pride addresses the situation of moral agents in possession of sufficient power to overcome determining factors, as well as the resistance of victims and bystanders, to freely enact their wills. What feminist theologians mean by the complementary sin of sloth addresses the situation of those lacking that kind of power and autonomy characteristic of moral agency. The sin of sloth recognizes that victims, precisely as victims, are not simply passive in their own oppression, but exercise will. Victims’ willing is not free, but sequestered, coerced or otherwise cooperating with their own oppression in ways that cannot conduct moral blame. If interpreted through the lens of a moral framework, where the will is supposed always to be free, this could only mean blaming victims. Feminist theologies of sin take that risk in order to name as sin what happens to victims to condition and bend their wills so that they participate personally – though not freely – in their own oppression.9 See, for example: Wanda Warren Berry, ‘Images of Sin and Salvation in Feminist Theology’, Anglican Theological Review 60 (1) (1979); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards the Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (London: The Women’s Press, 1986), Ch. 2; Susan Nelson Dunfee, ‘The Sin of

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2. The feminist discussion of sloth as a loss of the conditions for potent moral selfhood operates at the level of the personal and interpersonal. However, it assumes and depends upon an analysis of sin operating at the cultural and structural level: ‘patriarchy’ as ideology, legitimating, institutionalizing and normalizing oppression of women by men, structuring material relationships between men and women and insinuating itself into our most fundamental value systems, our (gendered) sense of how to be a self, our sense of right and wrong and of self-worth. We receive and internalize these meanings through the very processes by which we become centred (stereotypically male) or decentred (stereotypically female) as persons. We are not outside, free and neutral in respect of patriarchy; rather, it is inside us, disorienting our desires, identities, our wills.10 3. In the feminist discussions of the dynamics of selfhood, critiquing the tradition’s emphasis on the sin of pride and of the structural sin of patriarchy, we find a path being steered between the extremes either of hard determinism or absolute freedom. We find willing subject to such profound disorientation and constriction in the range of available choices, that it cannot be called free. Yet, at the same time, we find choices being made in ways that are genuinely personal, rather than forced or mechanical responses of automata. We find a similar set of concerns running through a third contemporary literature on sin, albeit without the same level of agreement. Theological discussions of addiction wrestle with the question whether the phenomenon is best described in terms of disease or as something freely chosen, at least in initial decision-making. The question whether and how addiction might be mapped onto the coordinates of the doctrine of sin depends not only on how addiction is to be characterized, but whether the grammar of sin is that of a moral language, requiring the exercise Hiding: A Feminist Critique of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Account of the Sin of Pride’, Soundings 65 (3) (1982); Mary Grey, Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption and Christian Tradition (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 15–19, 27, 91; Daphne Hampson, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr on Sin: A Critique’, in Reinhold Niebuhr and the Issues of Our Time, ed. Richard Harries (London: Mowbray, 1986); Daphne Hampson, ‘Luther on the Self: A Feminist Critique’, in Feminist Theology: A Reader, ed. Anne Loades (London: SPCK, 1990); Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 121–6; Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980); Valerie Saiving, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’, The Journal of Religion 40 (1960); Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 26, 31–43, 83–96. For my own discussion see further McFadyen, Bound to Sin, pp. 216–21. 10 See, for example: Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1992); Rebecca S. Chopp, The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 10, 33, 48, 122–6; Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards the Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, pp. 10, 33, 48 122–6; Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM, 1982), pp. 142–52; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (London: SCM, 1983), pp. 37, 164–73.

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of autonomy. In several of the most insightful contributions, the question is, in fact, turned round the other way and we are invited to explore the possibility that sin might, in reality, function at least as much like a disease as a moral defect resulting from bad decisions.11 Under the conditions of addiction, the will is still making choices, often reconstructing relationships to other people and other goods in service of the object of addiction, which has become the ultimate good, in relation to which all other objects of choice have value and in service of which they stand. Here there is choice, where no particular choice is strictly determined, but neither does willing have the neutral and arbitrary character suggested by a moral frame of reference. In a way that is perhaps clearer than in the other two examples, here the will appears to be enslaved and in bondage to sin. It would be correct to say that, in all of these examples, we are presented with situations in which the will is subject to profound disorientation and constriction, which deserves to be included in our description of what the reality of sin is, how it functions, and not just represented as a consequence of sin – of the misuse of freedom in the commission of bad acts. It is right to say that freedom has here been lost. Yet that is also at this point in the discussion potentially misleading. For what is meant by the freedom that has been lost? What is the freedom that is proper to us, that we once had and that is lost in sin? To answer that question, we need to connect our discussion more explicitly with a theological framework.

Sin, freedom and God In the previous section, I have tried to suggest that the reduction of sin to a moral language is the terminus towards which an account of freedom as autonomy in choosing leads. However, this fails to account for the radical nature of sin, which appears not so much as a phenomenon of our freedom of will, but as a dynamic Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2011); Christopher C. H. Cook, Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ched Myers, ‘Beyond the “Addict’s Excuse”: Sin, Public Addiction and Ecclesial Recovery’, in The Other Side of Sin: Woundedness from the Perspective of the Sinned-Against, ed. Andrew Sung Park and Susan L. Nelson (New York: SUNY Press, 2001); W. McDonough, ‘Sin and Addiction: Alcoholics and and the Soul of Christian Sin-Talk’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 32 (1) (2012); Patrick McCormick, ‘Sin as Addiction’, (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989); Linda A. Mercadante, ‘Sin, Addiction and Freedom’, in Reconstructing Christian Theology, Rebecca S. Chopp and Mark Lewis Taylor(eds) (1994); Linda A. Mercadante, Victims and Sinners: Spiritual Roots of Addiction and Recovery (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996).

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reality conditioning our willing – and, in two of the examples given above, sin is represented as a pre-personal distortion at the very heart of our personhood. It is insufficiently radical. There is good evidence, therefore, that the reduction of sin to a moral language is anthropologically inadequate. I now want to ask whether this conception of freedom as autonomy and the act-centred construal of sin are theologically adequate. It is revealing that, so far, I have found it entirely possible to discuss sin without once referring to God. It is a temptation not unique to moral frames of reference to suppose that we can construct accounts of human wrongness without intrinsic and explicit reference to God. Where sin is reduced to a moral language, however, the temptation is to concentrate on the formal characteristics of moral action, which are universal and un-varied, whether we think the norms of behaviour offended against have natural or supernatural origin. All that is necessary to turn the natural or secular language of morality into the specifically religious vocabulary of sin is to add the suggestion that the moral laws broken in the commission of moral offences are somehow from God and so, therefore, against God.12 All that is necessary for a rendering of sin within the constraints of a moral framework to become theological, therefore, is to incorporate reference to God as the legislator of the commands against which sins offend. Sins are therefore ‘wrongs’ against God as the legislative authority of broken commands. This could be expressed in ways that make the relationship of God both to these commands and to human beings external, arbitrary and somewhat static. God could be an absentee legislator, not now in any sort of active relationship with human beings. Moreover, the commands could be arbitrary, rather than legislated as a framework within which human life may flourish individually and communally in relation to one another and to God. What, then, makes sins wrong is not so much that they involve behaviour that runs counter to what makes for flourishing life, caught up in God’s active relating to us, but that they reject the arbitrary authority of God to make and require obedience to laws that are capricious in their disinterest in human well-being. And we should obey such laws just because God says so. In fact, this picture of God begins to look like the perfect form of the completely autonomous subject to which the account of human freedom given earlier corresponds – or rather images. Here, freedom is precisely that kind of arbitrariness that is unconstrained by any kind of necessity, including integrity or self-consistency. As in the characterization of this form of freedom in the human case, so in the Attfield, ‘The Morality of Sins’, p. 228.

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divine: freedom is known in its complete indeterminacy, in its neutrality and in its withdrawal from relationship. Whereas this can make very little theological sense in the case of the human (how can humanity be neutral in relation to God or withdrawn from relationship to God), an abstract, logical case could be made in the case of God. Indeed, the divine aseity has sometimes been expressed in terms of this form of radical freedom – freedom that, in mistakenly supposing God has, human beings seek to mirror in their self-understanding, to think of ourselves and our freedom apart from God. This is very unlike the characterization of God that we see in the Bible or in developed, Christian tradition. Not a divine being whose freedom consists in withdrawal from relation or whose freedom of action is established through arbitrary acts, discontinuous with the past acts or established identity or with a promised future. Instead, we see a dynamic and interactive, deeply relational identity internally constituted in the radical freedom of loving mutuality where the otherness or transcendence of the Trinitarian persons is coincident with the deepest intimacy. God’s being is more like a verb than it is a noun. God’s freedom and integrity is radical commitment and intimacy through which the other comes to the fullest flourishing in the integrity of its own being. In radical self-consistency, this abundant form of life free for the other, expresses its freedom externally by relating creatively, therapeutically and consummately towards created reality, including human beings. God is free in this inexhaustible, unconstrained interaction with humanity, oriented towards its fullest flourishing in the integrity of its own being in the most intimate communion with God – in which both transcendence and immanence are conjoining. In this perspective, what do human freedom and sin look like? First of all, freedom cannot consist in some supposed neutral sphere outside of relationship to God, nor in freedom of the will to choose anything other than an orientation towards God. Instead, freedom must consist not in making autonomous choices, but in one’s will being bound in active orientation that responds to God’s active movement towards and for us. In this, our wills do not stand in some neutral place, external to the relation with God; rather, they cooperate with the dynamics of grace in a way that inversely mirrors the way that our wills can be coerced into cooperation with the supra-personal and sub- personal dynamics of sin. This is, admittedly, a strange definition of freedom measured by the standards of reality conceived independently of an active relation with God. But that is precisely the point. From within that relationship, being caught up in joyful responding orientation to God (which we might, in shorthand, call

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worship) who is oriented towards the full flourishing of human beings individually and communally, is to be drawn towards the maximal possibilities of fully flourishing and abundant life together with others in the concrete conditions of existence. Freedom, as Augustine so clearly saw, cannot be correlated with the capacity arbitrarily to make choices, especially where those choices lead to a diminution in the integrity of one’s own being; to a restriction incapacity for joy in oneself, others and God; to bondage to something other than the living God (which we might, in shorthand, call idolatry). Is this not the picture of sin that we find throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, complex and unsystematic though that is? The varied verbs that we translate into English as ‘sin’ are most interested in charting some of the ways in which we fall out of the joyous and life-giving relationship with the Lord. On the whole, there is interest in acts and in legislative prohibition, only insofar as these indicate a falling out of that life-giving relationship, which threatens the conditions of individual and communal well-being. There is some, but little, interest in moral culpability, in establishing whether sin has been committed through deliberative acts of autonomous freedom and it is clear that the idea of sin can be inattentive to the conditions of subjectivity, such as intention or freedom to do otherwise. Overwhelmingly, the interest in agency lies not in the tracking of causal culpability, but in establishing what has to be done and by whom to restore relationship – when once again the people may enjoy freedom with and for the Lord. In conclusion, we might observe that the way that we understand freedom and construe its relationship to sin is a significant measure of the extent to which our understanding of sin is genuinely and distinctively theological (consequently resistant to being translated without remainder into secular moral, legal psychological or other categories). For the same reason, it is also a measure of the extent to which our understanding of sin is genuinely and distinctively Christian. For difficulties in calibrating the relationship between sin and freedom appropriately might be considered symptoms of underlying deficiencies in both theological anthropology and our doctrine of God – where our understanding of both human and divine freedom, divine transcendence and immanence, the integrity of creaturely being – all fail to be rooted in a specifically Christian understanding of God (or, indeed, any understanding of God). Through the Hebrew Scriptures to the developed doctrine of the Trinity, God is depicted primarily not in terms of static being, but as interactive and dynamic – more as a verb than a noun, one might say. So the measure of what is ‘appropriate’ or ‘deficient’ in respect of constructions of the nature of and

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relationship between sin and freedom is the extent to which they are rooted in, first, an understanding of God that is dynamic, interactive and relational; second, an understanding of humanity that is correspondingly relational, interactive and dynamic – constituted through this God’s relating to us.

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Reason Jason McMartin

Following St Paul in passages such as Romans 1.18-23, Ephesians 4.17-18, and 2 Corinthians 4.4, theologians have long explained unbelief by appealing to the incapacitation of human rational ability by the power of sin. Sin and the fall have corrupted human thinking, causing us to fail to know God as we should. Although other labels appear among theologians, the effects of sin on human knowing are most commonly designated as the noetic effects of sin (NES). The phrase derives from the Greek word for ‘mind’ (nous). Discussions of the noetic effects of sin are typically geared towards certain broadly epistemic considerations, but they potentially could include the emotions, the imagination, attitudes, and other non-epistemic mental functions. The effect of sin on human thinking frequently has been described in terms of its effect upon human reason. Reason can designate many things, and arguably the meaning of the word shifts in times and contexts. Consider, for example, the vast differences between reason as the highest approach of the human person to God (Aquinas), the devil’s whore (Luther), or a prized weapon of patriarchy (feminist thinkers). In relation to sin, the primary focus of the word seems to be the natural cognitive endowment of the human person, including both rational insight and perception, over and against divine assistance. This leads to an emphasis on human inability to obtain knowledge of God owing to sinful bondage. In the Middle Ages, reason was subordinate to explicating revelation; as loosening strictures allowed human cognitive capacities to become more autonomous, reason came to be perceived as a growing threat to faith rather than as its handmaiden. Sin’s deleterious epistemic effects link to broader considerations of the relationship between faith and reason, sin sometimes being cited as the reason for the inability for a smooth rapprochement between the two.

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Accounts of NES differ according to scope of effect and the operative notion of reason in view. How intensely and pervasively has sin impacted our epistemic practices? Are all of our capacities affected or primarily those related to knowledge of God? Some thinkers have examined sin within religious epistemology, while others have suggested using the doctrine of sin as a category in a more general epistemology. Generality also becomes a point of criticism of competing methodology, since it is common for thinkers to contend that others have not taken sin seriously enough in their epistemologies. In some instances, it may not be the case that the target view has failed to account for sin, but rather that it differs concerning the nature of reason, the relationship between reason and other human activities, and the nature of the person. A complete account of the noetic effects of sin, therefore, depends on theological anthropology. Although the breadth of salient assumptions cannot be canvassed thoroughly in this chapter, several relevant issues can be mentioned over the course of the exposition. The approach of this chapter will be to offer broad historical generalizations concerning the approach that theologians have taken toward the noetic effects of sin in order to show some differences among them and explain the implications of these shifts to the contemporary discussion. First, I will briefly survey some proponents of a more traditional emphasis on the effects of sin on the knowledge of God. Then, noting instances where NES has been used as a criticism of other views, I consider reasons for thinking that sin has a universal impact on our epistemic practices and may inform a general epistemology. I then describe one of the most extensive developments of NES as applied to general epistemology formulated by Merold Westphal, which also serves as a criticism of modernist epistemology. I contend that while Westphal is right to universalize sin’s epistemic effects, his preferred method for doing so suffers from some defects. Another suggestion of Westphal’s bears more promise for understanding how sin may have universal epistemic effects while still being rightly emphasized within certain domains. I add my own dispositional account of NES to show how it may be universal yet not unredeemable. I conclude by mentioning some areas for future discussion.

The Traditional Model of the Noetic Effects of Sin Most of the emphasis in the history of the discussion of the noetic effects of sin has been on the impairment of human ability to know God, and perhaps also

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on the impairment of moral knowledge. Accordingly, the noetic effects of sin were frequently framed as primarily affecting one half of a division between two realms. Justification for divisions of human knowledge into distinct domains can be found in Scripture. For example, we are called to direct our minds toward ‘things that are above, not on things that are on earth’ (Col. 3.2). Human minds are obsessed with earthly things when they should be directed towards things above. Distinct realms of knowledge imply distinct human epistemic responses. In a reflection on the nature of sin from early in his career, Augustine suggests that the essence of sin consists in the love of the temporal and the changeable at the expense of the eternal and the unchangeable. Augustine’s interlocutor in the dialogue, Evodius, sums up Augustine’s conclusion: I agree that all sins are included in this one class, and consist in turning away from godly things which are truly lasting, and in turning towards things which are changeable and insecure. Although these latter things are constituted rightly and in their own order, and attain a certain beauty of their own, nevertheless it shows a corrupt and disordered soul if we are given over to their pursuit, seeing that by divine disposition and right the soul is given power to control them at its will.13

Augustine’s account posits a twofold division of human persons that corresponds to the twofold division of the objects of knowledge. The division of humanity could perhaps have been inferred from the scriptural evidence, but is made explicit by Augustine: ‘we have distinguished precisely enough the two classes of things, eternal and temporal, and the two classes of men, those who love and seek for eternal things, and those who love and seek for temporal things.’14 Those who are disposed toward earthly things deviate from the norm of the love of God. Their directedness away from God is sinful. Augustine’s emphasis on the role of faith in restoring the mind crippled by sin continued in his later works and found autobiographical expression in his description in the Confessions of his own blinding Manichaean pride. In a manner similar to Augustine, Martin Luther divides the effects of sin among divine and human things, where the latter are virtually unaffected whereas the former have been devastated by sin. In godly affairs, humans are completely blind. Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, Dom Mark Pontifex (trans.), Johannes Quasten and Joseph C. Plumpe (eds), vol. 22, Ancient Christian Writers (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1955), p. 72. 14 Ibid., p. 71. 13

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In temporal affairs and those which have to do with men, the rational man is self-sufficient: here he needs no other light than reason’s. Therefore, God does not teach us in the Scriptures how to build houses, make clothing, marry, wage war, navigate, and the like. For here the light of nature is sufficient. But in godly affairs, that is, in those which have to do with God, where man must do what is acceptable with God and be saved thereby – here, however, nature is absolutely stone-blind, so that it cannot even catch a glimpse of what those things are.15

Luther expresses an emerging pattern of distinguishing the degree of sin’s effects based upon the objects or domains toward which it is directed. Luther here also signals that the noetic effects of sin are viewed as a rationale for the reformation’s emphasis on the necessity of Scripture. Luther could be taken as denying that sin affects knowledge acquisition of temporal affairs. Particularly within the Reformed tradition, the emphasis of the discussion of sin’s effects on knowledge has been on the inability of unredeemed human persons to perceive God rightly through their unaided rational powers. They do not gain true or justified beliefs about God because their capacity for doing so has been warped by sin. The Reformed tradition focuses its discussion of the noetic effects of sin somewhat narrowly on beliefs and capacity for belief formation that pertain to God. What is less clear is the extent to which this is a point of emphasis or of exclusion. John Owen, for example, explicitly signalled that he would pass over the effects of sin on domains other than knowledge of God in the unredeemed, while other theologians are not as clear. 16 In any case, it is not always easy to determine the boundary between minimal effect and zero effect. John Calvin frequently referenced the corruption of human rational powers through sin. His thought on the noetic effects of sin has funded much further reflection by theologians, particularly among those in the Reformed tradition. He held that our rational incapacitation arose from several sources, but that nevertheless humans are culpable for their failure to believe rightly about God.17 Sin does not remove human reason entirely, but causes it to be unfit for apprehending a saving knowledge of Christ. ‘Since reason, by which man discerns between good and evil, and by which he understands and judges, is a natural gift, it could not be entirely destroyed; but being partly weakened and partly Cited and translated in B. A. Gerrish Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 12. 16 John Owen, The Holy Spirit (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 248. 17 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Henry Beveridge (trans.) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), I.2.15, p. 62; Stephen K. Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin: A Historical and Contemporary Exploration of How Sin Affects Our Thinking (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), pp. 4–5. 15

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corrupted, a shapeless ruin is all that remains.’18 Humans may come to know many things, but they fail to comprehend the most important truths about God and about their spiritual condition. As was the case with Luther, Calvin focuses on the epistemic division of the objects of knowledge. He continues to divide the objects of knowledge into earthly things and heavenly things, a distinction he also describes in terms of superior and inferior objects.19 Our efforts to gain knowledge are not wholly thwarted by sin, particularly in the investigation of inferior objects or earthly things. Superior objects and heavenly things present a much greater challenge to our fallen epistemic abilities. Calvin explains this distinction as follows: It may therefore be proper, in order to make it more manifest how far our ability extends in regard to these two classes of objects, to draw a distinction between them. The distinction is, that we have one kind of intelligence of earthly things, and another of heavenly things. By earthly things, I mean those which relate not to God and his kingdom, to true righteousness and future blessedness, but have some connection with the present life, and are in a manner confined within its boundaries. By heavenly things, I mean the pure knowledge of God, the method of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom. To the former belong matters of policy and economy, all mechanical arts and liberal studies. To the latter … belong the knowledge of God and of his will, and the means of framing the life in accordance with them.20

To show the accuracy of his division between these objects of knowledge, Calvin points to the greater disagreement concerning heavenly things than concerning earthly things.21 The relatively widespread agreement in realms of knowledge falling under earthly things shows that these disciplines are less affected by sin than the category of heavenly things. Consensus provides the test for determining the extent of the effects of sin on human cognition. Abraham Kuyper ascribes a strict division between the capacities for belief formation of believers and unbelievers, since he emphasizes that believers have been given a new capacity in regeneration that unbelievers do not possess. This ‘regeneration’ breaks humanity in two, and repeals the unity of the human consciousness. If this fact of ‘being begotten anew’, coming in from without, establishes a radical change in the being of man, be it only potentially, and if this change exercises at the same time an influence upon his consciousness, then as Calvin, Institutes, II.2.12, p. 233. Calvin, Institutes, II.2.13, p. 234. Ibid. 21 Ibid. 18 19 20

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far as it has or has not undergone this transformation, there is an abyss in the universal human consciousness across which no bridge can be laid.22

Regeneration creates a new capacity for the creation of beliefs about God and all things related to God; the presence or absence of this capacity divides humanity in two. Kuyper insists that with respect to this division, no common epistemological ground can be found: ‘every effort to understand each other will be futile in those points of the investigation in which this [in principle] difference comes into play; and it will be impossible to settle the difference of insight.’23 There is a fundamental, qualitative difference between the intellectual investigation of the regenerate and the unregenerate. At that point, two scientific perspectives must diverge, even though various common understandings can be discovered. Kuyper sums up: ‘no polemics between these two kinds of science, on details which do not concern the statement of an objectively observable fact, or the somatic side of the psychical sciences, or, finally, a logical fault in argumentation, can ever serve any purpose.’24 Although Kuyper emphasizes regeneration as dividing humanity into two camps with their respective antithetical outlooks, the other side of this division is constituted by the unregenerate who still have not been redeemed from the epistemic effects of sin. The restoration of that capacity to believers creates an impassable epistemic gulf between them and unbelievers. Believers and unbelievers are simply unable to agree on all points of academic investigation because believers have access to a capacity for belief formation that unbelievers do not. In his early work, Karl Barth made a similarly strict division among humans, but, unlike Kuyper, he focused on the destruction of the human capacity for God rather than the implantation of a new capacity. Barth’s ongoing dispute with Emil Brunner concerned the Imago Dei and the conditions for revelation.25 Barth softened his position over the years, but remained insistent that due to sin and finitude, humans cannot have an active role in a revelational encounter with God because they do not have innate ‘point of contact’ that God addresses through revelation. He explains: The humanity and personality of sinful man simply cannot signify conformity with God, a point of contact with the Word of God. In this sense, as a possibility Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, J. Hendrik de Vries (trans.) (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.,, 1963), p. 152. 23 Ibid., 160. 24 Ibid. 25 The principal statement of the debate can be found in Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology, Peter Fraenkel (trans.) (London: Centenary Press, 1946). 22

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for God proper to man qua creature the ‘image of God’ is not only, as we say, with the exception of some remnants ruined, but annihilated … Man’s capacity for God, however it may be with his humanity and personality, has really been lost.26

While some aspects of the image of God in humans may only be damaged, the human capacity for union with God has been utterly lost and destroyed. Barth contends that this destruction is the result of human sinfulness. There is no general point of contact in humanity. Barth insists that God’s saving revelatory act creates the point of contact while also providing the revelation of God. The image of God in man of which we have to speak here and which constitutes the real point of contact for the Word of God, is the one awakened through Christ from real death to life and so ‘restored’ … The reconciliation of man with God in Christ includes in itself or else begins with the fresh establishment of the lost ‘point of contact’. This point of contact is, therefore, not real outside faith but only in faith … for what is possible from the standpoint of creation from man to God has actually been lost through the Fall.27

God creates the point of contact when God provides the gift of faith to human beings. Humans have no innate or acquired capacity for the reception of God’s revelation.28 The capacity for reception of revelation is given in the act of revelation. The lack of a point of contact in the natural human condition implies that there can be no common ground between believers and unbelievers in their beliefs about God. Since the point of contact is given in God’s revelation of God’s self, it cannot be spoken of philosophically but only theologically.29 Natural theology becomes at best fruitless in the search for God. Believers and unbelievers simply have nothing to say to one another on the subject of God because they do not have the same capacities for the apprehension of God. According to Barth, sin has eradicated the human capacity for accurate knowledge of God. On many points, Alvin Plantinga’s contemporary exposition of the effects of sin is consistent with Barth’s views, but contrasts with the early Barth by affirming that the capacity for forming beliefs about God is not lost but damaged.30 Plantinga postulates a capacity for producing beliefs about God Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, rev. edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), p. 273. Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 272. 29 Ibid., p. 274. 30 Kevin Diller,  Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a 26 27

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called the sensus divinitatis, which ‘is a disposition or a set of dispositions to form theistic beliefs in various circumstances, in response to the sorts of conditions or stimuli that trigger the working of this sense of divinity’.31 Humans naturally possess a capacity to obtain beliefs about God, but, following Calvin, Plantinga contends that that capacity has been muted and impaired by the effects of sin. ‘The sensus divinitatis has been damaged and deformed; because of the fall, we no longer know God in the same natural and unproblematic way in which we know each other and the world around us.’32 Barth restricts genuine knowledge of God to personal knowing through the work of the triune God and downplays (if not dismisses) the value of beliefs about God independent of this divine activity. Like Calvin, Plantinga construes the human capacity to form beliefs about God more positively by affirming that the capacity has not been annihilated, but only weakened through damage and by making a stronger distinction between propositional and personal knowledge of God.33 In addition to clarifying commonality and divergence between thinkers such as Barth and Plantinga, the distinction between propositional knowledge and personal knowledge of God may fruitfully explicate the earlier tradition as well. Paul Moser uses the distinction to provide an account of divine hiddenness whereby it can be plausibly asserted that God chooses to hide from at least some people some of the time in order to fulfil the divine purpose of developing moral, loving agents through their knowing God in a personal, filial way.34 God’s purpose is not for us merely to have propositional knowledge of him, and hence the amount of propositional evidence for God may not meet our expectations or meet our standards. Since God’s wants to move us beyond our self-centredness, he makes himself personally available in a way that requires moral transformation. We are cognitively idolatrous when we demand knowledge that suits our demands of control, clarity, and so forth. Therefore, ‘some of God’s hiddenness may result from our own blindness, our own failure to be properly receptive to God’.35 In Moser’s account, personal knowing is proper to God as personal subject, and NES may be adduced as at least one reason for its absence.

Unified Response (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2014). Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 173. 32 Ibid., p. 205. 33 Diller, pp. 256–60. 34 Paul K. Moser, ‘Cognitive Idolatry And Divine Hiding,’ in Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 35 Ibid., p. 135. 31

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Universalizing the Effects of Sin Perhaps only through a lack of emphasis, the theories considered above restrict the locus of sin’s effects to certain classes of beliefs, epistemic capacities, objects of knowledge, kinds of knowledge, or knowers. In most cases, the focus has been on the knowledge of God. It would appear consistent with these theories that sin has had a more widespread effect on our thinking, but perhaps in other areas besides the ones considered the effect is minimal or insignificant. Anselm both conforms to the pattern of emphasis on corrupted knowledge of God and strikingly diverges from it. He links the faith-seeking-understanding dictum to his confession that his capacity for apprehending God ‘is so effaced and worn away by my faults, it is so obscured by the smoke of my sins, that it cannot do what it was made to do, unless thou renew and reform it’.36 While he acknowledges the effects of sin on knowledge of God, he does so from the standpoint of faith rather than that of unbelief. Unlike Anselm, but similar to John Owen, Thomas Aquinas contends that all of the powers of reason in the soul were corrupted by sin, not just those pertaining to knowledge of God.37 Emphases or restrictions of the scope of sin’s epistemic consequences have often become the basis for criticism that a given epistemology has not properly accounted for the effects of sin. For example, some have suggested that Calvin disagreed with the views of Thomas Aquinas concerning the prominence and efficacy of reason in the fallen human person.38 Although it is not clear that such criticisms hit their intended mark, they do highlight an important emphasis of the contemporary discussion, which is that it is plausible to suppose that sin affects our knowing universally. Given the pervasiveness of sin, it seems reasonable to suppose that sin’s cognitive effects extend beyond beliefs about God and can be generalized to believers as well.39 Since Christians still sin, are Anselm, Proslogion, in Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (trans.) (Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2000), Ch. 1, p. 93. 37 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Fathers of the English Domincan Province (trans.) (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), I–II.85.3. 38 Others contend that the Calvinist theologians at Princeton seminary in the nineteenth century embraced the optimism of Scottish common sense realism, thereby betraying the traditional Reformed insistence on the devastating impact of sin on our epistemic practices. See Paul Kjoss Helseth, ‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 2010) for these two examples. Similarly, Stephen Moroney criticized Pannenberg and the reformed epistemologists for failing to include NES in their theories. 39 John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1987), pp. 20, 135; Merold Westphal, ‘Taking St. Paul Seriously: Sin as an Epistemological Category’, in Christian Philosophy, Thomas P. Flint (ed.) (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). 36

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disposed to sin, and bear the consequences of sin, it would seem they still suffer from NES. It would seem that sin potentially disrupts or damages every kind of belief, every belief-forming modality, and every human knower. Merold Westphal provides a detailed model that employs sin as an epistemological category, and he uses it as the basis for a criticism of the epistemology of Enlightenment philosophers. He claims they had a far too optimistic view of human reason because they had not included the impact of sin in their understanding of knowledge. A dominant theme in his writings is that the Christian theory of the epistemic effects of sin can be enriched through an investigation of the hermeneutics of suspicion, a strategy evidenced in his book Suspicion and Faith.40 He argues that the hermeneutics of suspicion developed by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche should not be dismissed or refuted by Christian theologians because their critique of religious belief and practice as serving selfish desires is both accurate and constitutes a secular version of NES.41 A theologian may appropriate these non-theological concepts by recognizing ‘when philosophers in various vocabularies suggest that desires and practices which in Christian terms are sinful play a constitutively distorting role in human belief formation and retention, personal and corporate’.42 Suspicion theorists discuss ways in which religious belief can be used irrationally for devious purposes, but this insight is not unique to the atheist suspicionists. Religious thinkers from the Hebrew prophets onward have made the same kind of critique of religious beliefs. Suspicion theorists identify corrupt motives utilized in our belief-forming practices; Christian theology identifies these corrupt motives as sinful. The Christian theologian can then incorporate the critique of the suspicionists under the category of the epistemic effects of sin. Westphal describes the hermeneutics of suspicion using three interconnected aspects: deviant desire, illicit function/purpose, and self-deception. First, we often form beliefs, justify beliefs, or perpetuate various belief-forming practices on the basis of bad desires. We wish for something to be true, so we believe it to be so. We want to exercise power or maintain a place of privilege and we attempt to justify the beliefs that support these desires. Some of these desires are manifest, some are hidden, and others are intentionally obscured. Second, even true or justified beliefs can be used for illicit purposes, since ‘the content Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.,1993). Merold Westphal, ‘Taking St. Paul Seriously’, p. 203. 42 Ibid. 40

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and function of our ideas can be very largely independent of each other’.43 Often certain beliefs are affirmed because they support a project that a person or group finds desirable. Westphal contends ‘truth can be used to hide reality from us a readily as falsehood’.44 Since operative motives and the roles that beliefs play are often hidden, the hermeneutics of suspicion investigates this distinction between content and function. The content of beliefs frequently diverge from the way in which those beliefs are employed.45 Third, and most relevant to the hermeneutics of suspicion, many of these illicit epistemic activities may be intentionally ignored by the agent in a process of self-deception. The critique of the suspicionists is elicited by attempts to hide such desires or functions from ourselves because we profess to disown these desires and our conscience convicts us of their presence in our belief-forming processes.46 Suspicion theorists use these features as the basis for a criticism of positions such as Husserl’s that appear only to affirm that consciousness reveals thoughts and intentions, rather than also serving to conceal them. Suspicion ‘differs from the transcendental psychology which Husserl sought to develop in that it refuses to take consciousness at its word, but rather treats it as a mask, a surface which conceals more that it reveals’.47 Consciousness is not always a neutral medium; simply allowing it to have its say when utilizing a phenomenological method is insufficient to reveal its depths. Suspicion theorists use resources such as Nietzsche’s affirmation of the deceptiveness of consciousness and Sartre’s account of bad faith to illuminate factors submerged below conscious awareness. Westphal’s unique contribution to the development of the theory of NES is the observation that the illicit processes of belief formation identified by the suspicion theorists is the same phenomenon as the epistemic effects of sin presented under a different description. His close association of the philosophical and theological accounts obscures some of the differences between them and arguably results in the absence of a clear soteriology.48 Westphal places the hermeneutics of suspicion together with the hermeneutics of finitude Merold Westphal, ‘Orthodoxy and Inattention’, The Reformed Journal 30 (1) (1980): 14. Ibid. 45 Merold Westphal, ‘Postmodernism and Religious Reflection’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 (1995): 132. 46 Merold Westphal, ‘Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics’, in The Very Idea of Radical Hermeneutics, Roy Martinez (ed.) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 56. 47 Merold Westphal, ‘Nietzsche and the Phenomenological Ideal’, The Monist 60 (2) (1977): 279. 48 Merold Westphal, ‘In God We Trust? Biblical Interpretation and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion’, in The Hermeneutics of Charity: Interpretation, Selfhood, and Postmodern Faith, James K. A. Smith and Henry Isaac Venema (eds) (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), p. 102. 43 44

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as the two branches of hermeneutical philosophy. A tenet of hermeneutical philosophy is that all awareness is conceptual and that concepts necessarily distort their objects. When this view is conjoined with Christian theology, NES is then understood as a process of concept formation whereby our fallenness prevents us from having awareness of anything as it really is.49 Buttressed by the affirmations of finitude and fallenness, hermeneutical philosophy exposes the pretensions of modern epistemology. It insists that truth, objectivity and other such goals are merely unattainable dreams.50 According to Westphal, NES supports a rejection of modernist epistemology’s assertion that ‘human reason [is] … a presuppositionless, neutral medium of thought’.51 The epistemology of the Enlightenment is foundationalist. It ‘envisages human thought not only as unconstrained by the limits of perspective, but also uncontaminated by the stain of perversity’.52 It pursues unmediated clarity, absolute certainty, and knowledge of the whole.53 For these reasons, Westphal contends that modernist epistemology is inimical to the development of the theory of the epistemic effects of sin.54 NES undermines modernist epistemology’s rejection of the conceptualization of all awareness and provides support for Westphal’s preferred alternative: hermeneutical epistemology.55 He contends that Christian philosophers should affirm an updated form of Kantian antirealism that asserts that the plurality of human perspectives in the phenomenal realm finds its source in human sinfulness.56 This view affirms that all awareness is conceptual and that concepts construct their objects. Making use of hermeneutical philosophy to develop his ideas, Westphal contends that sin impacts the human process of conceptualization. All awareness is conceptual and our concepts stand between us and the world, preventing access to the way things really are. This understanding of sin’s impact on human knowing provides the basis for a criticism of modernist epistemology. There are reasons to doubt that Westphal’s proposal provides the best way to construe sin’s epistemic effects as universal. First, Westphal’s account appears to It is worth noting that Westphal also believes that the doctrine of creation and the finitude of the human person supports this as well. Westphal, ‘Positive Postmodernism’, p. 56. 51 Merold Westphal, ‘Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution’, in Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge, C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (eds) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 162. 52 Westphal, ‘Taking St. Paul Seriously’, p. 208. 53 Westphal, ‘Postmodernism and Religious Reflection’, pp. 127–30. 54 Westphal, ‘Taking St. Paul Seriously’, pp. 207–11. 55 Merold Westphal, ‘Hermeneutics as Epistemology’, in The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, John Greco and Ernest Sosa (eds) (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 56 Westphal, ‘Copernican Revolution’, p. 177. 49

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make the epistemic ravages of sin an inextricable facet of the human condition and thus not redeemable, whether in this life or the one to come. There would appear to be little to no room for an epistemically finite yet impeccable Christ, a progressive sanctification of our epistemic practices, or a future alleviation of epistemic misery. No role for human epistemic responsibility may be found in the midst of this version of sin’s universality. The epistemic result of this theological conundrum is pervasive scepticism: we are never entitled to think that we possess truth or justification. Second, contrary to Westphal, it seems that some moderns included sin in their epistemologies, albeit using a differing understanding of the nature of human reason. Peter Harrison has argued that a recognition of sin’s deleterious effects shaped the development of the experimental method in science.57 He contends that Bacon’s development of modern experimental method in the natural sciences sprung in part from a recognition of the deviance of the natural order from its created telos through the operation of evil and sin: ‘this intransigence of nature rendered it opaque to the minds of its would-be interpreters’.58 Bacon insisted that the scientific investigator could not rest content in determining the ‘natural course’ of nature, but should recognize ‘that facts needed to be forcibly extracted from a nature constrained and manipulated by the mechanical arts’.59 Artifice and manipulation were required in order to extract aspects of the natural realm obscured by sinful corruption. Harrison contends that this provided a motivation for the development of modern experimental science. Harrison’s exposition of the rise of experimental science indicates another path forward for the contemporary discussion, which itself is suggested by Scripture. Paul describes the duress of the created order as it awaits its redemption with the same longing expressed by human persons for their salvation in Romans 8.18-22; the scope of God’s saving work extends beyond human persons. We can infer that the natural realm has been corrupted and disordered through the presence of evil, which comprises one of the epistemic effects of sin indirectly.60 The natural world as an object of knowledge resists the ability of the human mind to apprehend it correctly because it has been made irrational through the presence of sin. Alister McGrath explains that ‘[t]he Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 58 Peter Harrison, ‘Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2) (2002): 255. 59 Ibid.: 256. 60 Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 57

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created order, as it presently exists and as it is presently conceived, incorporates within it a deep-rooted dimension of disorder, with the potential to skew and confuse our interpretation of its identity and signification’.61 This effect is not on the mind directly, but on the ability of the mind to comprehend its object. This theological affirmation encourages an attempt to identify the features of the natural world that provide evidence of disorder. Sin not only corrupts our ability to know, but also corrupts that which we attempt to know; it introduces opacity into the objects of knowledge.

The Principle of Inverse Rationality Westphal has also discussed a facet of sin’s epistemic effects that constitutes a more promising way forward. He calls it the principle of inverse rationality, and it shows the compatibility of the traditional bifurcation of the effects of sin on knowledge pursuits with the more recent insistence on the universality of sin’s effects by noting differing degrees of impact across various domains. In this case, focus on the effects of sin on knowledge of God or on religion would be simply a matter of emphasis rather than a denial of sin’s effects on other kinds of knowledge. It is plausible to think that sin has had a greater impact on beliefs concerning God, perhaps evidenced by marked degree of divergence of religious beliefs. Certain domains of human knowledge, such as religion and ethics, contain much greater variety of belief and dispute than others. The principle of inverse rationality suggests that areas of greater existential concern such as ethics and religion are more likely to suffer the adverse effects of sin, and thus we are more likely to be irrational in our thinking about these areas.62 The greater the existential import and the greater degree to which a belief makes claims on my life and action, the greater the likelihood that I will be irrational with respect to those beliefs. Claims or obligations made on my life have the potential to stand in conflict with my own corrupted self-centred desires and projects. As the urgency of a contradictory claim increases, so does the degree of probability that I will attempt to avoid the conclusion. Those areas in which I most need to be rational are also those that are most likely to encroach on my carefully constructed world. The principle of inverse rationality possesses a great deal Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology, Vol. I: Nature (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), p. 290. 62 Westphal, ‘Taking St. Paul Seriously’. 61

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of initial plausibility given the apparent consensus of fields such as the natural sciences and mathematics when contrasted with the plurality of opinion in religion and ethics. Yet it would seem that these former areas are still affected even though not to the same degree. The twofold division considered above is best understood as an emphasis, rather than as a strict division and can be qualified as being less accurate for regenerate human knowers than it is for the unregenerate. Perhaps the unregenerate more frequently fail to gain knowledge of heavenly things. Rather than the twofold division, Emil Brunner proposed a continuum to express the way sin impacts domains of knowledge. On the basis of both Scripture and experience, Brunner affirmed that those who do not know God can have a great deal of knowledge about the created world, yet sin may not be optimistically ignored.63 To mediate between these two principles, Brunner begins with the familiar twofold schema, but he concludes by affirming a continuum. He explains: Sin does not hinder men from knowing the things of the world, the laws of nature, the facts of nature, and man in his natural, historical and cultural manifestations. But the more we are dealing with the inner nature of man, with his attitude toward God, and the way in which he is determined by God, it is evident that this sinful illusion becomes increasingly dominant. The more closely a subject is related to man’s inward life, the more natural human knowledge is ‘infected’ by sin; while the further away it is, the less will be its effect. Hence we find the maximum of sinful blindness in the knowledge of God itself.64

The result, according to Brunner, is that certain spheres of knowledge are more greatly affected by sin than others. Roughly, Brunner asserts the order of greatest to least effect as follows: theology, ethics, the humanities, the social sciences, and finally the natural sciences and mathematics. Stephen Moroney rightly criticizes the twofold division as being ‘too simplistic to adequately account for the many varieties of human knowledge and whether or not they were affected by sin’.65 Moroney likewise distances himself from Brunner’s somewhat artificial division into distinct disciplines of study. For example, Brunner suggests that ‘in the sphere of natural science, for instance – as opposed to natural philosophy – it makes practically no difference whether a Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, Olive Wyon (trans.) (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1952), pp. 26–7. Ibid. 65 Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin, p. 37. 63

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scholar is a Christian or not’.66 It is not clear that the two are so strictly separated from one another. Changes in the practice of natural science have corresponded to changes in natural philosophy and vice versa. Moroney’s analysis hints at the insight that the disciplinary divisions are sociological rather than substantive. The perpetuation of disciplinary boundaries may owe in part to the effects of sin on human thinking since scholars desire to prove the importance of their own fields and fear venturing into domains in which they are not trained. No field of knowledge can be exempted from the effects of sin, yet the effects of sin are not so constraining that they make knowledge unobtainable. There are two compatible routes forward for understanding NES as both universal and yet as variably effective. First, the principle of inverse rationality can be understood as a description of the ordering of human dispositions. We are disposed to act against God, which in turn disposes us to pursue our epistemic practices in the service of the self. Our universally bent disposition pervasively impacts beliefs, capacities, processes of conceptualization, and so forth without entailing that those beliefs, capacities and conceptualizations are universally and irredeemably broken. Moreover, my dispositions may be progressively sanctified. We are less disposed to obtain true and justified beliefs about God, because these beliefs threaten our autonomy and self-interest. Knowledge of and about God is the most immediately threatening to our projects. For this reason, it can be placed at one end of the continuum of sin’s epistemic effects. Similar remarks could be made about ethics. Conversely, beliefs about natural science and mathematics usually have little impact on our self-interest. They are accordingly placed at the opposite end of the spectrum. Since this is a dispositional account of the principle of inverse rationality, the expression of these tendencies varies widely. Our own activity guides the expression of these proclivities allowing for a greater diversity than can be explained by Brunner’s formulation of the principle. For example, genuine knowledge of God may serve as means by which I oppress others and assert my dominance. I could have a great deal of non-sin-tainted knowledge of God that I employ for sinful purposes. Likewise, I may deny various theses in natural science or mathematics because I have become aware of their theistic inferential implications. A dispositional account of the principle of inverse rationality allows for a variety of expressions while still capturing a plausible generalization about the epistemic effects of sin. Second, following Moser’s suggestion concerning divine purposes in his selfrevelation, God wants us to develop as moral agents, learning to be loving and Brunner, Creation and Redemption, p. 27.

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other-centred. Hence our knowing of God must be personal and not merely propositional. Since persons make demands on me, I am disposed to avoid relationally fraught knowledge in a sinful avoidance of threats to my autonomy. As indicated by James 2.19, the precise problem is not lack of assent to evidence per se, but trust and obedience. This shows the deep rupture and conflict that sin places within myself as I both do and do not desire to know and be known by others and by God in the way I was created to do.

Areas for Future Discussion This account of the principle of inverse rationality both affirms qualms theologians have had concerning appropriation of secular learning while at the same time preventing those concerns from becoming an insurmountable obstacle. As Westphal suggests, the insights of many non-theologians have the potential to enhance the theological discussion of NES greatly. Initial steps have been taken in this direction. Westphal and contextual theologians have mined the resources of the philosophers of suspicion. Moroney has used the insights of social psychology. Particularly within the social sciences, many concepts have yet to be exploited in this regard. Given the pervasiveness of the effects of sin on our epistemic practices, exploration of the unique facets of sinful distortion within various kinds of knowledge acquisition and among various objects of knowledge would provide a uniquely theological contribution to general epistemology and link theology with a wide variety of non-theological disciplines. Within the theological disciplines and theological methodology, too, the effects of sinful distortion would be usefully considered. For example, intellectual vice in the form of the noetic effects of sin would complement nicely the notion of interpretative virtue used within discussions of the theological interpretation of Scripture. Philosophers working within the Christian tradition have initiated much of the recent discussion of NES. Additional theological resources and connections would enhance these proposals greatly. Extensive consideration of the effects of sin on human thinking has the potential to contribute to the development of a robust theological conception of reason, rather than settling merely for a theological evaluation of models of reason that are culturally prevalent.

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Judgement and Wrath Jeremy J. Wynne

One comes to the Christian doctrine of judgement today with a fairly predictable set of concerns. Even among those who trust and seek the guidance of scripture, our habits of mind have often been deeply informed by scepticism over the constancy of God’s character, doubt over the proportion of God’s justice to human sin, and mistrust of any law that would come to us from outside ourselves. Even more significant is the deep-seated therapeutic drive that characterizes not only society as a whole – and here I’m thinking especially of my own American context – but also the church living in its midst. Many are increasingly convinced that truth be determined and retained on the basis of this one criterion: that it makes us feel better. As one theologian has recently argued, on this account we seek a God who ‘promises results that are safe, effective and enjoyable’ and then allow our theology to follow.1 The satire throughout that particular essay is biting, though I should add that it is certainly not new.2 Yet the rhetoric is wed to a poignant insight. What the fictive ‘nice God’ refuses to tell his creatures is the one thing that, according to scripture, would save human life. This essay is about that one thing, namely that the God who creates and redeems sinful human beings is the righteous Judge. This way of phrasing it emphasizes at the outset that divine act and being should be set in closest connection. The former manifests the latter. Therefore, there is no proper notion of judgement in dogmatics that can be articulated without direct reference to the righteousness that God simply is in his own life. For Karl Barth, it is through this perfection that God ‘does that which is worthy of Himself, and D. Stephen Long, ‘God is Not Nice’, in God is Not … Religious, Nice, ‘One of Us’, An American, A Capitalist (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), p. 45. Famously, Tertullian’s jibe: ‘A better god has been discovered, who never takes offence, is never angry, never inflicts punishment!’; cf. Adversus Marcionem I.27.

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therefore in this fellowship [with creatures] … asserts His worth in spite of all contradiction and resistance’.3 Defining righteousness in this way opens up a concept of judgement. Where sin is present, wrath is indeed the mode of God’s righteousness as he condemns and disposes of sin. But such judgement is worthy of God because, in the same act, he would illuminate, affirm and uphold his creatures. Of all that could be written on this topic, certain important matters are simply beyond reach. These include the outcome of final judgement (i.e. heaven and hell), as well as ancillary topics like the imago Dei or modernity’s dubious relationship to the concept of the soul’s immortality. I intend to focus only on developing a pair of fundamental questions. I will start by examining the scope of God’s judgement. The goal here is to think through the unity of God’s work without, on the one hand, collapsing the significance of final judgement into the work of the cross or, on the other, slavishly conceding the notion of a shift in God’s character and activity. My second task is to frame a biblical understanding of the measure of this judgement. I explore how the embodied life of Christ moves us beyond two things – a calculating sense of justice and a negative view of the law – and thus turns theological attention to the totality of one’s life before God. Inevitably some part of this answer will be elicited and shaped by the cultural and philosophical pressures registered above. However, Gerhard Sauter has reminded us that theological conduct is properly eschatological in nature and, because of that, it ‘refuses to become involved with the “existing”’. His point is not that the theologian should deny the ‘historical, cultural, and social contexts of discovery’ in which she works, but rather that her proper context is always the promises of God, and on that basis, she should expect from her work ‘a response that was not indicated in the question’.4

The Scope of Judgement – ‘the One who was, and is, and is to come’ (Rev. 4.8) Reading across the canon, God’s judgement is severe. That much, I believe, is not in dispute. The more difficult aspect of this history is that, even despite Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), pp. 376–7. For John A. T. Robinson, all eschatological statements concern ‘the final sovereignty of God’; see Robinson, In the End God (London: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 41. 4 Gerhard Sauter, Eschatological Rationality (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), p. 185 3



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the severity, it seems often that God has not dealt decisively with sin. To put it another way, there is genuine movement within the Old Testament scriptures – from Abraham as father of ‘many nations’ (hămôn gôyīm) to the Valley of Decision in which ‘scores upon scores’ (hămônîm hămônîm) will conduct holy war against Yahweh (cf. Gen. 17.4-5; Joel 3.14) – and this movement toward the massa perditionis significantly raises the tension regarding God’s righteousness and justice.5 In the end, the texts bear witness to a history that is baffling apart from a canonical understanding of the triune God and the eschatological horizon within which he works. Consider just a few examples. A great flood is sent in judgement upon human beings because ‘every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually,’ and yet it fails to cleanse (cf. Gen. 6.5; 8.21). While it is clear that ‘humanity remains undeserving of the gift of manageable life in a regular world order,’ what remains unexplained are the grounds on which ‘the gift is given nonetheless.’6 Another difficult example is the gross idolatry of Israel at Mt Sinai. God moves from a desire ‘to consume’ (kālâ) the people to a gracious pledge that he will remake the covenant (cf. Exod. 32.10; 34.10). We may be grateful for the reprieve, but inevitably the question of the rightness of the act arises, for it begins to look as though God’s ‘freedom to forgive whomever he wills’ requires that he turn a blind eye to evil.7 One of the most tender images in all of scripture serves as a final example. For a child who will not return to him, Ephraim – a child he has taught to walk and lifted to his cheek – the Lord contemplates a return to exile. But then his glory plots another direction: ‘my heart recoils (nehpak) within me’ (Hos. 11.8). As with all the witnesses considered above, this passage also foregrounds a shift that is so arresting it suggests an element of capriciousness in God. ‘[I]n bringing his rebellious son to account,’ James Mays says, ‘covenant rights are transcended by the love which originated the covenant.’8 And in this manner, the word of God already uttered in judgement is once again placed in apparent opposition to his heart. We tend to think of God’s mercy – or the lack thereof – as the single greatest challenge in reading this history. It might be argued, however, that it is God’s justice which presents the real challenge. Where in all this is right judgement? Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology, M. Biddle (trans.) (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011), p. 474. 6 Walter Moberly, ‘On Interpreting the Mind of God: The Theological Significance of the Flood Narrative (Gen. 6–9)’, in The Word Leaps the Gap (Grand Rapids; Eerdmans, 2008), p. 61. 7 Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus (Louisville: WJKP, 1994), p. 251. 8 James L. Mays, Hosea (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), p. 156. 5

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The answer given in the gospel is that this entire history of perdition (Verdammnisgeschichte), encompassing not only Israel but the nations (i.e. Rom. 1.18-3.21), indeed calls for proof of God’s justice.9 Precisely because of his forbearance (anochē), it is not yet manifest where broken and rebellious creatures have been held accountable and set right before the triune God of love. This is the conundrum of all human life between creation and consummation as it exists in the open-endedness of the economy, when the truth of these individual events is treated in rigid isolation from the whole. The alternative is to allow the scope of judgement to be determined by the person of Jesus Christ, the one ‘whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement (hilastērion) by his blood’ (Rom. 3.25; cf. LXX Lev. 16.11-22; also 1 Jn 2.2; 4.9f.). What was once veiled – the righteousness of God in dealing with sin – is unveiled in him to faith. And insofar as Jesus Christ is the mercy seat, the one in whom sin is judged and wiped out, the fullness of God’s wrath can no longer be treated as if it lacks a centre, as if it describes isolated, punctuated events. Rather God’s wrath is undertaken according to his own good timing. God chooses one particular time and place in which to deal justly with all sin, to act on his fierce opposition to all that threatens the lives of his people. In Israel’s history it is spoken of as ‘the day of the Lord’ (Ezek. 30.3) and as a ‘new thing’ that God is doing, in making ‘a way in the wilderness’ which will turn his people’s hearts from the past to the future (Isa. 43.19). It is something that Jesus knew about himself as resurrected Lord; and if he is indeed the correct interpretation of ‘Moses and all the prophets’, then he himself is the proper resolution of the conundrum posed above (Lk. 24.27, 44). In the cross of Christ, ‘the infinite weight and meaning of suffering and death has been borne’.10 Not only is God’s justice vindicated, but in light of this utter rejection of God-abandonment, all other experiences of divine judgement now appear to us as mere tokens – provisional and penultimate. The mysterious and joyful news of the gospel is that justice has indeed been done, outside of us (extra nos) and yet on our behalf (pro nobis). There is a powerful stream within modern theology, however, that would make this point unintelligible, and it is important to put this option in the clearest light. According to this view, ‘wrath’ does not belong to God’s perfection but to the economy, as a feature of the world that God has set in place. These theologies often resolve in mechanistic or organic images. So, for example, wrath For the following, see also the extended discussion in my monograph, Wrath among the Perfections of God’s Life (London: T&T Clark, 2010), pp. 147–64. 10 Barth, CD II/1, p. 395; cf. pp. 393–406. 9



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is defined in one place as ‘the world in its essential structure reacting against the sinful corruption of that structure’.11 In another place retribution is described in quasi-mystical terms as entailing ‘not a new action which comes upon the person concerned from somewhere else; it is rather a last ripple of the act itself which attaches to its agent almost as something material’.12 There is much that is attractive in this approach. It approximates the instrumental nature of much of the divine action described in scripture. It also distances God himself from acts of judgement, placing him straightforwardly and without complication on the side of suffering humanity. Not least of all, conceiving morality in terms of a tight coordination of sin and suffering dispatches with the idea of ‘some external or arbitrary punishment’ assigned to sinners (e.g. Gal 6.7).13 In effect, the so-called problem of evil is dismantled by denying that God is able or willing to intervene.14 But this solution also creates a series of insurmountable problems. As a statement concerning divine activity in the world, for example, the theory is more opportunistic than carefully reasoned. There is imposed on scripture an arbitrary distinction between the judgement which comes by means of economic process, on the one hand, and the blessing in which God gives good gifts, on the other. Within such an arrangement, all that remains is the power of nature, which controls the entire physical world and soon shrinks back to a minimum and eliminates the restricted domain that had initially been reserved for the moral rule of the good. For the good is not a power that can withstand the power of nature if it lacks grounding in an omnipotent God, who is the Creator of both the natural and the moral orders.15

To this conceptual loss is added the demise of a genuinely representational notion of punishment. Any theology that attempts to follow after the witness of scripture and thus desires to speak of divine judgement, in other words, will require the Judge himself. In stating the truth of one’s offence and giving the ‘one good always owed to the offender in punishment’, it is he who appoints a fitting response.16 Apart from the Judge, all such experience might make one deeply unhappy, it might be recognized as a source of injury, and even be lamented Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), pp. 55–6. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962), pp. 384–5. 13 John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (London: SCM Press, 1977), p. 366. 14 While sin can lead to suffering of all kinds, Jesus explicitly rejects the possibility of running the logic backwards, so that suffering is evidence of one’s sin (e.g. Jn 9.1-3; Lk. 13.1-5; cf. Ezek. 18.20). 15 Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), p. 699. 16 Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 118. 11

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as a tragic turn of fate. But only by sleight of hand could this be construed as judgement. The final and most important cost of immanentist theories of God’s wrath, however, is that they render God’s freedom incomprehensible. If the cross of Christ is indeed the proof (endeixin) of God’s justice (Rom. 3.26) – and if, as Barth argues, Jesus Christ simply is the covenant partner in whom God has chosen by ‘His free ruling and disposing’ to deal decisively with sin – then ‘God is the Lord in all His rule, even in that of his wrath’.17 Wrath does not spring mechanically and uniformly into effect. And for that very reason the judgement of God here and now does not foreclose upon history but allows it to remain open. One sees it at work in anticipation of the cross; it is also part of the biblical witness to Christ’s parousia. Each presses us to distinguish our suspicion that God has been delinquent in his promises (i.e. bradunō) from the patience he in fact shows for the sake of our salvation (i.e. makrothumeō; 2 Pet. 3.9, 15; cf. Rom. 11.29). Up to this point, I have drawn attention in the strongest terms possible to the all-sufficiency of the cross in God’s judgement upon sin. Scripture itself speaks of Golgotha as bearing this ‘once and for all’ (hapax) significance (Heb. 9.12, 26). The strength and clarity of these statements, however, appear to collapse all of theology – even the end – into that one, perfect-tense event. The result would be a kind of ‘christological over-determination of eschatology,’ whereby the ‘already’ is made to encompass the totality of what theology must say and thus exhaust the ‘not yet’ of Christ’s sudden return (1 Thess. 4.16-17).18 But clearly this isn’t the case. Not only does experience bear witness to a lack of such moral progress – something which we as moderns are still coming to terms with – but scripture affirms a remaining work, which belongs irreducibly to God and will not be disclosed until the end. Jesus Christ will appear a second time ‘not to deal with sin’ but rather to save those who are ‘eagerly waiting’ (Heb. 9.28; cf. Rom. 8.30). Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that the underlying unity-in-difference is best articulated in terms of God’s promise. The promise put the human present, with all the pain of its incompleteness and failure, in the light of the future of God that comes to us as our salvation. This does not mean that the promised future is already the present. The concept of promise links our present, which needs salvation, to God’s future, but at the

Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), p. 221; cf. CD II/1, pp. 407–22. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Last Things First? The Century of Eschatology in Retrospect’, in The Future as God’s Gift, D. Fergussonand M. Sarot (eds) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), p. 227.

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same time it keeps them apart. For the promise is as such different from the consummation that is promised.19

And the distinction that it protects grounds hope for a coming judgement, one which is final rather than provisional, objective rather than relative. It will consist in an uncovering of all human life in its relationship to God. ‘This judgment is just; it corresponds to the way things are in this present reality. It will be a true unveiling, an unveiling of what was already seen by the eyes of God during the present, earthly existence.’20 The Nicene Creed (381 ad) follows the biblical witness in confessing this newness in terms of God’s glory. In glory Christ will return ‘to judge the living and the dead’. The clarity that the Son bore in the Father’s own presence (Jn 17.5), concealed as it was in his flesh, and present in his resurrection only as a prolepsis, is not merely a sign of his identity but the very light and authority by which he publishes the moral state of creation. God ‘has fixed a day’ for this judgement (Acts 17.31; cf. Rom. 6.4). And the single greatest validation of Jesus’ authority is thus the work of God in raising him – glorifying him – from the dead. In the end, however, not all is new. The unity of God’s life and character provides a limit to the distinction between cross and parousia. We will know we have made too much of the difference, for example, by our assumption that in the end the warrior will replace the suffering servant, the lion will replace the lamb. The disjunction would necessarily treat the dies novissimus as a second act within God’s plan, distinct in its mode and criteria and enacted by God’s Son in a new posture toward the world, one that is best summarized in terms of a startlingly different character and goal. Whether the One who returns in glory is the same One who died upon the cross, requires a balanced consideration of the witness found in the allegedly disparate texts – in this case, the Synoptic Gospels and the Apocalypse. It is widely recognized that the evangelists present in Jesus a king who refuses to rule after the manner of worldly powers. These powers clamor to take hold of social and political influence; they resort to lies, coercion and violence to achieve their ends. Within the Roman empire, a cross was used especially ‘on the lower classes – slaves, violent criminals, and unruly elements in society’. It was an expedient, not only capable of satisfying a lust for revenge and the utter humiliation of one’s enemies, but, as Hengel has described it, of asserting ‘the

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), p. 545. G. C. Berkouwer, The Return of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), p. 156.

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triumph of the state’.21 This was the heart of Roman judgement. But it was not the judgement of God, and thus it is this option – the humiliation and subjugation of enemies – which Jesus Christ ‘in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius’ renounces as the ostensible right by which ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ will be given to him (Lk. 3.1; 4.5). Richard Hays writes, concerning Jesus’ reign, that ‘[t]he hope of vindication and justice lies not with worldly force – that is the satanic temptation rejected at the beginning of his ministry – but in God’s eschatological power’.22 Miroslav Volf goes further. With sensitivity to the world’s violence, Volf argues that the violence of the cross actually disarms God’s own people of recourse to such weapons. It is crucial to his argument that by a backward glance the cross of Christ teaches ‘self-giving love’ and ‘the willingness to absorb violence’ as the only alternative to the sword. But this possibility is for Volf equally dependent upon the gesture forward, namely the knowledge that ‘truth and justice, have been, and will be, upheld by God’.23 In all things Jesus ‘did not return abuse … but he entrusted himself (paredidou) to the one who judges justly’ (1 Pet. 2.23; cf. Rom. 12.9, 19). His point is not that all conflict is extirpated, but that it is handed over entirely to the right work of God. It is only at first blush, then, that John’s vision of a rider ‘clothed in a robe dipped in blood’ (Rev. 19.13) seems to conflict with that of the suffering servant. The former is indeed a vision of judgement and war. And unlike the evangelists’ account of the cross, it is not merely a foretaste that is presented here but the feast itself, not a betrothal but a marriage. However severe and jarring the initial announcement seems, the overall context of John’s writing shows that a profound reversal of power structures is still at work. The blood in which the Rider is soaked is no trophy earned in combat, but his own, brought with him to the battle. This blood is the reason he is worthy to enact judgement at all, namely because ‘you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed (agorazō) for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation’ (Rev. 5.9). So too the weapon he wields is that of his Word of judgement and messianic righteousness (cf. Isa. 11.4; Ps. 96.13; Mt. 10.34). When the details of the description and subtleties of context are accounted for, it is not clear at all that the image somehow challenges the justifying work of Christ. Rather it underscores that his death alone conquers sin. Up to this point, I have focused intently on the scope of judgement. I have Martin Hengel, Crucifixion: The Ancient World and the Folly of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1977), pp. 86–8. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (New York: HarperOne, 1996), pp. 329–30. 23 Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p. 295. 21

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argued that it is a persistent feature of the canonical witness, precisely because it is an irreducible feature of God’s presence to his covenant people. I have also argued that it unfolds as a centred work, which is enacted in the cross of Christ and vindicated in his resurrection, and yet incomplete apart from his glorious return. What remain are a number of important questions concerning the measure by which this judgement is executed.

Judgement’s Measure – ‘Here is the man!’ (Jn 19.5) Within the witness of Holy Scripture, there is the closest relationship between God’s creating and redeeming work. One sees it unfold in a complex series of gestures forward and backward between the sovereign, performative force of God’s speaking, on the one hand, and the intimate, self-sacrificial rescue of all that belongs to him, on the other. Faith in God is good news precisely because he is the One who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Rom. 4.16–17; cf. Ps. 51.10). It is thus out of his eternal life and from his place as author – above and prior to his people – that the Lord judges the innermost reaches of his people’s lives. He is in an absolute sense ‘the knower of hearts’ (Acts 1.24; 15.8) and ‘the one who sees in secret’ (Mt. 6.4). The great novum of covenant history, however, is that Jesus of Nazareth is vindicated as being in himself the authoritative Word of the Lord. He is the one whose incarnate life cannot be accounted for by anything in history, even in germinative fashion. Contrary to the modern doctrine of cause and effect, there is witness at the heart of the gospel to a propitious interruption of time.24 The laws and forces of history are shown in the light of Christ’s new life to be no longer compulsive and controlling. And by extension, the One to whom all judgement has been given is neither a neutral arbiter nor a proxy appointed to interpret and apply a rule that stands outside himself. Neither is the command of God an ideal that is merely hoped for, dependent upon the complex struggle of one people, who are responsible for translating the command into a commensurate form of life. Rather Jesus Christ is himself the concrete fulfilment of the law, the man whose life exposes and calls to repentance the fallen human heart. As he is both loved and hated in his earthly ministry, there takes place a sharp division among people. The royal presence of Jesus had the effect of dividing them within themselves and among themselves; it Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 45.

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cut into the differences already there and exposed them, but also brought other differences into the situation that cut across the old ones, but these were final differences which had already cast upon them the shadow of the final judgment at the last day.25

In this particular way Jesus is the krisis of history, before whom ‘all are naked and laid bare’ (Heb. 4.13). Among those he meets, the truth of every act and aspect of their lives is pinpointed and, like a master surgeon, he offers to excise the foreign matter: ‘this one thing you lack’ (Mk 10.21).26 In the perfect coordination of word and deed, he himself draws the distinction between that which belongs to the kingdom of God, on the one hand, and all that which, on the other, must be excluded as alien. Barth continues: These are not timeless, objective spheres. They appear to be so to moralistic and physico-metaphysical thinking, like two worlds joined in a parallel way through all times, or two full scales balancing each other in time and even in eternity … But in the unity of time the first of these spheres is basically the sphere of what is past, and the second is no less basically the sphere of what is to come.27

What is ruled out is any contemporaneity between sin and obedience, any equilibrium between the two. This is a real tipping of the scales toward the latter. The clarity of judgement is thus a possibility that arises in connection with this embodied measure. We can expand on this in several ways. First, in thinking through God’s righteousness in closest connection to the incarnate life of the Son, the intention is certainly not to move away from the reality of the law, as if it were only thin, rigid, and general. Law is irreplaceably the language in which the moral dimension of covenant life is accounted for in scripture.28 Separated from the moral intelligibility of law, descriptions of God’s wrath inevitably devolve in the direction of an incalculable amoral force, ‘like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near’.29 Not only this, but the separation surrenders the law’s complex, positive meaning, which is impressed on us as the T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, R. T. Walker (ed.) (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 143 26 For this reason, it is the humility, obedience and truth of Jesus Christ which, for Barth, properly controls a formal discussion of sin. Cf. CD IV/1, pp. 358–513; IV/2, pp. 378–498; IV/3.1, pp. 368–478. 27 Barth, CD II/1, p. 626. 28 So sin can be summarized in several different ways, as with a concept of ‘covenantal dysfunction’; see Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 133. But to describe how sin is actually manifested (e.g. idolatry, immorality or injustice) requires a moral lexicon adequate to the realities of command, obedience and freedom. 29 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 18. 25



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vertical requirements of life before God (the first table of the Decalogue) rightly order the horizontal requirements of life together (the second table). Apart from this order, the law would indeed be flattened out, and its so-called third use, by which Christians ‘learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord’s will’, would be obscured.30 While bare prohibition might in itself provide for a certain social stability, rightness within the worshipping community is ultimately dependent upon rightness with God. A concrete example is instructive. Stealing is excluded by the most straightforward hearing of the law within Israel (Deut. 5.19; although cf. Prov. 6.30-31). But where the law is regarded as a whole, the prohibition to stealing is given its true trajectory and measure as it refuses to make an idol of money or possessions (Deut. 5.8). One finds in Israel, therefore, that the law moves beyond mere prohibition toward the ingraining of generosity in all of life. Provision for gleaning is an excellent example (Lev. 19.9-10). In the context of Jesus’ ministry, however, the reason that stealing undermines human life is given new clarity. For everything the gospel has to say about mammon and idolatry, it is the description of why ‘thieves must give up stealing’ that illuminates the positive, complex requirement of the law. The apostle signals the truest alternative: ‘Rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy’ (Eph. 4.28). Such is the life of the communio sanctorum united under her One Lord, for whom fulfilment of the law is dependent upon the irreducible work of God’s Spirit: Only a formulation and execution of law that can meet legitimate claims can establish a lasting stable order in human relationships. But this demands the overcoming in all members of society, not just the rulers, of the power of sin that engenders overweening claims. In keeping with the promise of Jer. 31.33-34 it demands that the righteous will of God be living and active in all human hearts.31

Christian spirituality, therefore, has at its fingertips several practices that promote a rightly ordered life–among them, contempt for the world and wanton charity. But at its root, as R. R. Reno has argued, resistance to stealing will require resistance to finite beauty. And that is only possible ‘if we allow ourselves to be ravished by infinite beauty’.32 It is this positive, complex meaning John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, J. T. McNeill (ed.) (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), II.vii.12. 31 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 584. 32 R. R. Reno, ‘God or Mammon’, in I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, C. E. Braaten and C. R. Seitz (eds) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 235. 30

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of the law that Jesus Christ’s own life manifests and, on that account, provides the embodied measure for judgement. A second significant implication follows. The judgement of God can be construed most adequately as a totalizing rather than calculating act. Judgement does not proceed by a quantification of Jesus’ life, the attempt to translate it into ever-finer requirements, so that the deeds of every other person – good and bad – might be weighed against it. Art lovers have been misled in this sense by great works like Hans Memling’s triptych The Final Judgment (c. 1467–71). With the kingdom of God to his right and hell to his left, the Lord is depicted there in the ambiguous and so theologically awkward position ‘in between’. Before him, moreover, are set scales for weighing human lives. The message is inevitably communicated: life is a hair’s breadth from death, and the former can be had only as acts of righteousness slightly win the day. This interpretation is understandable, since building blocks for this kind of calculating theology are present in scripture. Paul’s warning about the coming day of God’s wrath – as the chiasm suggests – is rooted in divine impartiality. It is a day, when God’s ‘righteous judgement will be revealed … [and] he will repay according to each one’s deeds (kata ta erga)’ (Rom. 2.6; cf. v. 11). So too in the apocalypse, the judgement of all who stand before the great white throne is executed ‘according to works’ (kata ta erga), which are recorded without exception (Rev. 20.12).33 These pronouncements give powerful assurance to God’s people that judgement will correspond to life. However, the idea that they are likewise an impetus to greater works, so that God might be swayed in his judgement, would directly contradict the scriptural insistence that life is always a gift. Salvation is ‘not your own doing’ precisely in the sense that God’s grace removes the possibility of ‘boasting’ in one’s own works (Eph. 2.8-9). The key for us is not to inquire which one should be retained as the measure of judgement, but to ask whether these aspects of the gospel can and should be ordered to one another in some specific sense. The traditional response is not to exclude works altogether from the Christian life, but rather to see good work as that which arises through grace in the course of life in Christ. Works indeed become a consideration in judgement, but not as that which earns God’s favour (cf. Eccl. 12.14; 2 Cor. 5.10; Eph. 6.8; 1 Pet. 1.17). Some theologians have gone even further, such as with Bonhoeffer’s theology of sanctification by faith. Even though we are ‘created for good works, which Clearly, there is a kind of faith (cf. notitia), which supplies no works in evidence and is thus dead; in this sense, even the demons ‘believe’ in God. See Jas 2.13-14, 19; cf. also, Eccl. 12.14; 2 Cor. 5.10; Eph. 6.8; 1 Pet. 1.17.

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God prepared beforehand to be our way of life’ (Eph. 2.10), he argues, as such these deeds are completely hidden from one’s eyes until revealed at the end (cf. Mt. 25.37). For those who are in Christ Jesus, ‘God promises good works with which they will be able to stand fast on that day; God promises to preserve them in the state of sanctification unto the day of Jesus. All we can do is trust in this promise of God because it is God’s word, and then go and persist in carrying out the good works for which God has prepared us.’34 Good works, then, are ‘expressions and products of the principle of life that lives in the heart (Mt. 7.17; 12.33; Lk. 6.44).’35 Such a life does not earn but only confirms one’s belonging to Christ. In this sense ‘the central decision of life, namely for Christ or against him’, writes Berkouwer, ‘is the crucial factor and circumscribes life in its entirety. One’s whole life and its central direction will be laid bare in the parousia.’36 In an important and recent book, Stephen Travis gives close exegetical attention to the range of material within the New Testament and confirms this point. His conclusion is that there exists an essential consistency in scripture, even between Paul and the Gospels. ‘People’s destinies’, he argues, ‘will be a confirmation and intensification of the relationship with God or alienation from him which has been their experience in this life.’37 Beyond the calculating language of one’s works, then, there is a more fundamental reality witnessed to in scripture, namely the totalizing reality of one’s relationship to Christ by faith. Finally, Christian dogmatics should give a clear and winsome account of the love that both grounds this severe confrontation and attends it at every step. There is hardly a more challenging notion for the genuinely modern mind. At the apex of the enlightenment, the inward light of reason was ‘deemed capable of sustaining any and all moral demands’ placed upon one.38 Not only was it assumed that the autonomous human being can know her own experience completely, but the possibility of a new word coming to any human life ab extra was thereby ruled out. To all of this, God’s judgement says no. It makes plain that no human faculty or capacity, no intelligence or moral discernment in itself corresponds to God’s own. The inevitable loss of self seems abhorrent to the self-made man or woman. And in fact, ‘[t]here is no more severe illumination of our lives’ than is possible

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), p. 279. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, p. 700. 36 Berkouwer, Return of Christ, p. 161. 37 Stephen Travis, Christ and the Judgment of God, 2nd edn (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2008), p. 211. 38 James I. Martin, The Last Judgment: In Protestant Theology from Orthodoxy to Ritschl (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 95. 34 35

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by this light.39 God refuses to take human beings on their own terms, to collude in the myth of independence and affirm personal integrity sought apart from divine judgement. Sinners are illuminated as sinners, in other words, and called into question at the deepest existential level. In this way, God meets those whom he loves with unwavering opposition. Gerhard Forde rightly estimates the impact: ‘The Old Adam and Eve in us can’t survive in the face of that attack and so clings desperately to the last hope’ that we might somehow, and on our own terms, count.40 For this reason, a faithful response to Jesus Christ is always a dying with him.41 But God’s judgement is not therefore dehumanizing. We must deny the insinuation that it is a callous or domineering act, or that is an indiscriminate, conflagrating sweep across a doomed landscape. God judges in order to bring to light every hidden evil amidst the good that still belongs to him and which he refuses to give up. Judgement is the unyielding love of the One who knit us together, reconciles us to himself and draws us into a consummated kingdom. It is not in contradiction of God’s love, then, but in affirmation that his love is genuine – that this love includes God’s wrath against all sin. Orthodox theology has most often defended this kind of thick concept as the only one both selfconsistent and adequate to the gospel. Evil and injustice abound in the world, and given that the triune God is in himself love, ‘it is not right for Him, when He sees such things being done, not to be moved and to rise up in vengeance against the criminals and to destroy those baneful and harmful ones, in order to have regard for all the good’.42 The words belong to Lactantius, but the claim has been articulated and reaffirmed again and again among Christian theologians. The goodness of the prophetic word is that it speaks the truth about us both as criminals and as victims. It makes public all wrongdoing. And where sin is owned as such by faith in Jesus Christ, it can be dealt with decisively and borne away. The love expressed in judgement is therefore not only that God holds Eberhard Jüngel, ‘The Last Judgment as an Act of Grace’, Louvain Studies 15 (1990): 397. Gerhard Forde, Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler Press, 1991), p. 37. 41 Woven into ordinary Christian life, in fact, is the rhythmic practice of self-judgement. To undergo baptism is to accept the guilty verdict anticipated in God’s final act of judgement, while observance of the Lord’s Supper – with its requirement for self-examination – is its continual reaffirmation. Judgement is inevitable; it will happen either willingly, as one aligns herself with that divine word, or else unwillingly ‘as it falls upon those who, in the blindness of selfish secularism, side against the Lord Jesus’. See C. F. D. Moule, ‘The Judgment Theme in the Sacraments’, in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, Davies and Dauber (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 472. 42 Lactantius, ‘The Wrath of God’, Fathers of the Church, vol. 54: Lactantius: Minor Works, M. F. McDonald (trans.) (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), p. 97. For his distinction between divine and human anger, see pp. 108–10. 39 40



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sinners accountable but that he also accounts for sinners. The Christian hope for judgement stresses that the human being is not such a creature, someone who is ignored and fades away as a shadow, whose deeds and omissions are left to pass away, a matter of sheer indifference. For, in the perspective of this hope there ever exists One who asks about every person and who unendingly takes every person seriously in relation to that which he or she has accomplished in life.43

Despite every good intention, protests against God’s judgement ultimately side with the status quo, choosing merely to continue the pattern of the world and therefore to dispose silently of the vast majority of people, who are judged by the world as unworthy of attention and comment. The true work of God is different. It has as its end the flourishing of his people. The hope to which this judgement gives rise, the hope which knows the crucified Lord as the one whose word finally matters, can never make one indifferent to the demands of the present. Rather, it charges each and every moment with an eternal significance, turning us to the grace of Jesus Christ and opening us up for a free and obedient response.

Wolf Krötke, ‘Hope in the Last Judgment and Human Dignity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2:3, P. Ziegler (trans.) (2000): 277.

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Finitude and Death Katherine Sonderegger

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf ’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. Robert Frost (American poet, 1874–1963) With a power reserved only for poets, Robert Frost gives voice to the haunting riddle of all created life: nothing gold can stay. Here below everything changes, deforms, declines: earth’s early flower stays but an hour. The circuit of a creature’s life, the rising to the setting of the sun, marks out the limits of a life: dawn goes down to day. The most delicate, the most dearly prized, the most longed for and sheltered: these slip through our fingers, dashed, corrupted, dissipated. These are the ways of the world of becoming; all good is seared by loss. We do not simply fear and grieve our own deaths, and the deaths of those dear to us; rather, our very structure as creatures – limited, bounded, fragile – are haunted by death, the disorganization, failure and corruption of finite life. This is the definition of creaturehood: finitude and death. These are our very nature, the nature of all Nature; yet we grieve them, fear and reject them. Such is the enigma, the elegy, of created life: its very essence is defined and bounded, and this is both its very great good and its last enemy. The delicate task for Christian theology is to say how this can be so, under the gracious providence of God, and His righteous movement against sin. The

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dogmatic task demands great care. On one hand, the ligaments of creation, the state and structure of created beings, is temporal and material finitude; creatures are not the Infinite God. And this is the creature’s blessing and great goodness. And on the other hand: So Eden sank to grief. We really need no manual in our day to teach us this ‘on the other hand’. We know in our bones the pain and horror of corruption and death. No century is as drenched in death as is the twentieth; and the twenty-first may well teach us a death of species and habitats and homelands that previous eras could only reserve for a nightmarish invasion, an apocalypse. But it does not require a world history lesson to teach us the anguish and limit of loss: the diminishment of a single life can do this very well indeed. A day of hunger or pain could do this; even an hour. A body riddled with cancer – an entirely natural, biological phenomenon – can sear this into our attention. A peaceful death, after a long life, honoured in its day: that too and the irresistible pull of history’s amnesia, its limited memory even of the good, can usher in the knowledge of grief, the tang of it. This is the state and destiny of human creaturehood. The Lord God kills and makes alive, on one hand; and, on the other, Death is the Last Enemy. Wisdom has created all things in weight, measure and number; and the Lord did not create death. How should dogmatics honour both lessons of Holy Scripture? How to give proper weight and measure to the truths on both hands? And how should the Doctrines of Creation and Sin teach about them? These are the questions life itself poses to each of us, ineluctably, irresistibly. Every Christian doctrine will fall within their shadow. We may begin, then, with some very general comments on the Doctrine of Sin as it is lit up by our specific theme. An ancient debate in Christian teaching centres on the definition of sin itself: is it a human condition only? And does human sin consist in an act or is it rather or also a state of being? Readers familiar with the history of Christian doctrine will recognize the contours here of the debate between the aging Augustine and the moral teacher, Pelagius.1 Of course this is not the place for a full-scale exegesis of the Pelagian controversy; but our essay demands at least a brief survey. Frost himself, after all, no stranger to the Augustinian framework of New England Calvinism, evoked with powerful compression this entire region of debate: So Eden sank to grief.2 Dogmatic theology offers to transpose poetic For these debates, see St Augustine, Four Anti-Pelagian Writings, J. Mourant and Wm Collinge (trans. and intro.) (Washington, DC: Catholic Press of America, 1992). The writing on the Pelagian controversy is of course enormous. But the reader who would like a modern inflection of this debate might consult Reinhold Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures, published as The Nature and Destiny of Man. 2 For an account of Frost’s religious wrestlings, see Jay Parini, Frost: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). 1



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concision into analytic idiom. So, our special theme will require an expansion, an unfolding and airing of Frost’s elegiac insight. Theology asks: Is the natural world itself sinful or under the power of sin? Does the world lie under sin, as the apostle Paul writes? Then, turning to the human creatures within the cosmos, we ask: Is our sin something we do? Something we suffer at the hands of others? Or is there now, or always, a condition, a state of global existence, that marks out human nature as sinful? These questions Augustine catches up in the phrase – largely Plotinian in origin – of ‘the Fall’.3 Now, Pelagius was quick to seize upon the neuralgic point: has Augustine collapsed creation into sin? If he has, does this not make the Good God the Author of sin? Indeed, there is worse. Does not Augustine show the Creator punishing sin by more sin, so that the Divine Judge Himself and His Righteous Wrath are contaminated by sin? These are the very questions Pelagius raises in Augustine’s reading of Romans 1: ‘God handed them over.’ Now, we need not settle here the vexed questions raised by the exegesis of Romans – that is the work of another lifetime – but we can say here that however one reads Romans, Pelagius appears to come out a winner. It is not surprising, in fact, that Christians of every age have found Pelagius’ confinement of sin acts to the human will – to disobedience and lawlessness – an attractive and altogether intuitive alternative to Augustine’s notion of penalty and Fall. Consider for example how bright shines the line between Creation and sin in the Pelagian cosmology. Just as Genesis and the whole Christian tradition has taught, creation is clearly good in the Pelagian schema. The natural world, in all its parts and principles, is the good gift of the Good God, held in being by His benevolent Hand. Finitude and death, the creature’s natural telos, fall easily and cleanly into the category, creation; little wonder that Socinians have long taught the natural mortality of the first human pair.4 Disease falls cleanly too into the broad reach of Creation; its sufferings and miseries should be borne by the Christian not as a form of sin and its penalty but rather as so much chastening and purifying fire by a Provident God. Such moralizing readings of the ills of the flesh can be found across the Fathers of the Church. It is by no means confined to Pelagians! A particular form of theodicy, drawing from Hebrews and James, looks to justify disease and physical suffering as forms of Divine medicine. For a recent analysis of the Plotinian inheritance of Augustine, see John Kenney, Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4 Socinus – the Latin form of the Italian name, Fausto Sozzini – was a radical son of Reformation humanism, rejecting traditional Latin teaching on Original Sin, Grace and Atonement. His legacy stands behind the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English polemics over Socinianism. See, for example, Jonathan Edwards’ essay, A Preservative against Socinianism. For a recent history of these conflicts, see Diarmaid MacCullouch, The Reformation (New York: Viking Publishing, 2004). 3

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Consider Gregory of Nyssa and his anguished dialogue with his dying sister Macrina. Here disease and pain are so much cauterizing for a soul, tempted to cling to things earthy, unworthy of heaven. So too Basil regards much of the bodily weakness, illness and suffering of human nature as strong medicine from the Good God, bitter on the tongue, but at heart life-giving and curative.5 Such theodicies and their architects are not Pelagian; but they share with Pelagius the conviction that the frailty, suffering, and hardship of creaturely finitude belongs squarely among the goods of creation. We might mention briefly here – and return later for more – the decidedly anti-Pelagian, Karl Barth. Justly famous is his treatment of the problem of evil, found in Church Dogmatics, volume III, part 3, ‘On Nothingness’. Remarkable for a thinker of such Augustinian temper, Barth sides with Pelagius in this one regard: finitude and death are natural goods of the creature. These frailties belong to the ‘shadow side of creation’, not themselves evil or sin, but rather good and gracious and fruitful, given under the Provident Hand of God, even in their darkness and danger. ‘It is a slander against creation’, Barth famously intones, to treat of these limitations, disappointments, and endings as evils or punishments. God Himself has entered into the cosmos, defined and delimited in just this way; like a king who honours a city by entering its gates – Barth is strongly Athanasian here – so creation in all its strictures and losses, its light but also its deep shadows, is glorified by the Incarnate Lord in its midst. Finitude and death are borne by Christ, too; they are his livery for a season, and we are clothed with them as our creaturely inheritance.6 So, the broad category of creation is sharply distinguished by Pelagians and non, from the sin that clings so close. For the Pelagian, sin belongs to another chapter altogether from the grand narrative of Genesis 1. Sin is our human work; we are its wilful authors. Few matters are so settled in Christian doctrine as is the axiom that God cannot be Author of sin. We creatures alone bear the guilt and penalty of our sin, which springs, Pelagius tells us, from our deeds. Death becomes sin when we act to snatch at death before its appointed hour. Two recent translations of the Cappadocians present the ascetic teaching of suffering as created goods: Gregory of Nyssa, The Soul and the Resurrection of the Body, C. Roth (ed. and trans.) (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993); and Basil the Great, On the Human Condition, N. V. Harrison (trans.) (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005). This form of argument has a long life: see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 48., a. 2; or, under different idiom, Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1952), especially Chapters 1, 8–10, 14, 15. 6 For the shadow side of creation, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), §50; for Athanasius, see ‘On the Incarnation of the Word’, in Christology of the Later Fathers, E. Hardy (ed.) (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954). 5



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We murder; we wound another; we rise up in anger and envy, and strike our neighbour. Perhaps our neighbour lies in want or need. Famine or poverty or nakedness attends them – limitation and want in their material form – and we deepen them or harden our hearts to them, and do nothing. We ignore the corporal works of mercy. We offend God’s Holy Laws. We steal, creating limitation and need when the world and its creatures should be luxuriant in God’s bounty. This is all our doing, and a Pelagian can sternly and clearly rebuke the offender.7 The distinction, wide spread in the Fathers, between the sinner and her sin, or more frequently and biblically, between the Image and the Likeness of God, allows a clean divide between sin and the good creature.8 A particular notion of human action lies embedded in all this moral exhortation. Sin follows on deed; deed follows on what Pelagius famously calls, possibility, the ability to act or refrain from acting, according to one’s will. This is the ‘liberty of indifference’, the gift of the Good God, ingredient in our nature, ineradicable, and the ground of our guilt and responsibility. The notion that sin is a moral affair – quite apart from the debate over merit and grace – already closes off a worry about finitude or natural death. We do not bear them with a troubled mind, though they may burn to the touch. To be limited and frail, to live with injury and decline until our mortal end: these are simply the contours of a creaturely life, and however painful they may be, we carry and endure them as the markers of a good, finite life. Not so the Augustinian. Now, it is difficult to capture in a few words so massive a sea-change as is Augustine’s thought-world from that of Pelagius. Though of course this controversy has gone by the name of the ‘Pelagian debate’, this feud with Pelagius hardly enters onto the same battlefield at all. Even a brief reading of the pamphlet war between Augustine and his opponents discloses the great gulf fixed between them. It is as though we see, fought out in print, the eruption of a salvation religion from the settled landscape of an ethical-cultural

A stern moralism and ascetic self-discipline has earned the Caroline Divine, Jeremy Taylor the attribute ‘semi-Pelagian’. See his Holy Living and Holy Dying, excerpted in Jeremy Taylor, Classics of Spirituality Series, T. Carroll (ed.) (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990). Taylor is by no means alone in the stern seventeenth century. The Catholic Reformation under Spanish instruction, in Theresa of Avila or Ignatius Loyola; the Puritan protest against English latitudinarianism; the sombre application of Calvin’s Third Use of the Law: all these movements urged self-discipline, self-restraint and the bearing of suffering with a brave mind. For a liturgical expression of this flinty temperament, see the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, in the Book of Common Prayer, 1662. 8 This distinction can be found, for example, in the Cappadocian texts cited above; the repudiation of it as unbiblical – though with careful qualifications – can be found in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.15.3. A modern treatment of the whole theme, with many innovative proposals, can be found in Ian McFarland, The Divine Image: Envisioning the Invisible God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). 7

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one. Of course Pelagius knows the Scriptural language of grace! He too is a student of the apostle Paul. Pelagius uses ‘grace’ frequently. Even Christ the Redeemer finds His place within the whole. But this is the landscape and the idiom of moral virtue, a discipline and practice, that is exercised under the tutelage and help of a Great Pioneer, who shows how self-control and courage can lead to a righteous life. Augustine does not even take the field against a vision like this. Of course he too extols the moral life, the commandments and ordinances of God, and the strait discipline of virtue, chastity, self-denial. But his is a world ringed about and hemmed in by guilt and poverty and need. Everywhere in Augustine’s polemics, Christians are shown as ‘crying out’ to the Lord for mercy, for deliverance from intolerable burden and shame, for liberty from the prison of guilt. The clean divisions that sit down so squarely in the Pelagian landscape, so pleasing to the eye and mind, have broken down radically under Augustine’s hand. The world has now become an enormous hospital ward, the whole creation groaning under the weight of suffering and death. We human beings are patients, to be sure – the patients in greatest calamity, huddled into a ‘mass of perdition’. But the whole creation lies under the curse of Adam: cursed be the ground because of you. The hard labour of tilling the soil, the famine that stands so near to every table, the pain of childbirth, the enigma of a child’s death, smothered even while it sleeps, the misery of good intentions spoilt, the gnawing temptations of pride and envy and greed – all these miseries are the catastrophe Augustine names, Original Sin. We might best capture all this for our theme by saying that Augustine considers creaturely being infected at its very root. From Adam and Eve radiate out the contamination that seeps into every heart, every deed, every death, every created thing. This is the state or condition of the Fall; it is universal and it is global. From this condition, creatures call out for salvation, a deliverance from finitude, sin and death.9 Now, this broad and sweeping summary of Patristic debates furnishes language for our theme. We can now speak with greater precision about finitude and death, and how they might appear at once the legacy and penalty of sin, and the good gift of the Provident God. Take as a beginning instance the condition of finitude itself. Striking among the many marvels of Genesis 1 is the remarkable diversity of creatures the Lord God has made. Often Christian apologists exhort us to wonder that there is anything at all, rather than nothing; the so-called ‘wonder So strong is this Augustinian conviction that death is penalty for primal disobedience that Anselm can deny that human beings are naturally mortal. See Cur Deus Homo, I.9; II.2.

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at being itself ’.10 But such wonder does not itself touch on the most astonishing revelation of being as recounted in the book of Genesis: that it pleased the Creator of all to make not just one created substance, but many. Genesis 1 and 2 brim over with the rich diversity of created being: birds on the wing; creeping things of all sorts; monsters that ply the great deeps; greater and lesser lights; fruit trees and streams; animals of all kinds, near companions to the human creatures, set in a garden, luxuriant in foliage and food. Note that Genesis discloses the direct, Divine word for each created kind: Let there be. So familiar is this narrative form that we modern readers do not stop short at the break such Divine Command makes with classical tradition. The Creator does not fashion first an undifferentiated and universal ‘created being’, either intellectual or material. The Lord God does not make ‘finitude’. Platonists in the early Hellenistic age, on the other hand, found a doctrine of emanation deeply congenial. The mysterious relation between the One and the many, they thought, could be investigated through a descending chain of mediators, each bridging according to their genus, the stark divide between Infinite and finite.11 Augustine bears the impress of these classical cosmologists when he speculates about a first, intelligible being, utterly simple, uniform and perfectly general.12 Such early speculation stands over against the explicit, defined, and diverse finite, creaturely beings of Christian cosmology. In Genesis they are welcomed into existence by the Lord God. So, we might ask: why was the Divine Will to create not satisfied with a single, undifferentiated kind, ‘the finite’? Why would the Creative Act of God not be completed in a single, uniform creature? Now, philosophically inclined readers may well be inclined to answer with a form of Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason: reason does not necessitate the creation of many beings; but it does suffice to make the act rational and benevolent and free. Just such justification is implied by the frequent theological turn of phrase: ‘it seems to have pleased God to act in this way’. We can say more directly, and in Scriptural tongue, ‘Let there be light’ expresses the Divine Good-pleasure in particularity, in diversity. This is a strong form of finitude. Created beings are set off from one another by distinct outlines or borders; one substance occupies A favourite theme of Thomists – though by no means confined to them – and which can be found in a broad defence of Thomas’ Five Ways in Jacques Maritan, for example. See Existence and the Existent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948) or Degrees of Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). 11 On this broad theme, see J. Rist, Plotinus: the Road to Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967); R. C. P. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988); and an older classic, Austin Farrer, Finite and Infinite (London: Dacre Press, 1959). 12 For this speculative cosmology, see Augustine’s Confessions, books 12 and 13 as well as his On Genesis. 10

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space, next to another. We can remain neutral here about Kant’s famous debate with Leibniz over space,13 and simply affirm that the created order disclosed in Genesis entails the setting of finite being in location and distinction from one another. Note, again, the strength of this Divine commendation of finitude: the Lord God did not cease creation with the execution of creaturely kinds. Now, it may seem immediately intuitive for the modern reader to consider ‘kind’ the proper object of Creative Will. The individual animals we see on this earth, after all, could simply be the constituents of what Aristotle called, ‘natural kinds’; these kinds, we might assume, form the scopus of the Divine Mind. What would the kind, flying thing, be without individual birds to soar through the dome of the sky, we might say. But this position simply marks us out as the children of Western, Christian culture, for Plato at times in his philosophical career, could only imagine kinds – ideas or forms – as the true and proper reality, fashioned by the ‘Father past finding out’.14 The complex problem of individuation – a conceptual legacy of the notion of natural kinds – cannot be taken up here; but we can say that the existence in the cosmos of singular creatures, particular and concrete, is everywhere shown in Holy Scripture as the true and full creative end of the God of Israel. Kinds there may be; but the individual sparrow, this one and that, the single hair on a disciple’s head – these are the object of Divine Love and Will. (This, after all, is the primary meaning of the freighted term ‘substance’ in Aristotle’s physics; perhaps this made his cosmology congenial to Thomas Aquinas, a shrewd and deeply faithful reader of Holy Scripture.) The strong notion of finitude we have laid out here underlies many created goods. That human beings, for example, can touch one another, that they can respect one another’s privacy, indeed form a notion of privacy at all, that they can join together in common cause or enjoy solitude: these common acts of human dignity and joy rely upon the notion of finite, individual existence. The very act of recognizing or rejecting the Person of Christ – Is He not Mary’s Son? – requires an individual face and feature and delimitation. Christ’s unique existence as Everyman – Behold, the Man! – cannot erase His existence, also, as this particular Carpenter and carpenter’s Son, the very one, born in Bethlehem. So, we might say the finitude, in this rich, strong sense, belongs firmly on the side of the Good God and His Creative Word. For this quarrel see Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith (trans.) (New York: Macmillan Press, 1929), ‘Appendix: The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection’, pp. 276–81. For Plato’s theory of forms, see The Symposium or The Phaedrus; for Plato’s mystical account of creation, see The Timaeus.

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But this is hardly all that a Christian would want to say about finitude! Not everything that is limited and defined and bounded seems part of the Creative Intent of God. Think for a moment about the finite state we call ‘ignorance’. Now it seems to follow from creaturely finitude that human beings would not be omniscient. We cannot know everything, we often exclaim – usually in our own defence. In this sense, we casually oppose finitude to Infinitude; categorical knowledge to Omniscience. But ignorance in fact should be distinguished from finite knowledge, though it no easy matter to say how such a distinction should be made. Ignorance does not simply name ‘culpable finite knowledge’, a clearly question-begging definition at any rate. Ignorance seems rather to denote a kind of misery we human creatures labour under; it is the ingredient in what Paul Tillich famously calls the ‘condition of finitude’.15 Think for example of our ignorance about the origin and proper treatment of cancer. Human beings as a whole, patients as a kind, or scientists themselves are hardly culpable for such lack of knowledge. Indeed the industry, the diligent and painstaking research and the nervous attention paid to cancer in the developed world can only be considered a species of finite mind, harnessed and hard at work. Yet we know so little. A ‘cure for cancer’, so prominently announced as a ‘moral equivalent of war’ in the 1960s, seems all but out of reach, today, quixotic even, in face of the very great diversity of cancers that invade the human body. Now to be ignorant of such things, and convicted of the monumental task of alleviating this darkness, does not seem all of a piece with the finitude we have extolled above. Or we might consider an analogue of the finitude of other human minds: we are ignorant of the inner worlds of other human beings, and much more, the inner world of other animals, other living beings. We do not know ‘what it is like’ to be our brother or sister, much less what it is like to be an osprey, circling the sea for food, or a salmon, climbing the rapids back to spawn.16 Now, such ignorance gave us the sense of distance and separation we called ‘privacy’ above; but this lack of knowledge can hardly stand as unalloyed good. We mistreat one another, we savage non-human animals, we turn a blind eye to massive suffering because, in part, we cannot know from the inside what others experience and endure. This too is the ‘condition of finitude’ but seems to lodge more in Augustine’s fallen landscape than in the clear sun of created goods. A cardinal notion in Tillich’s Systematic Theology. See, for example, vol. 1, part 1B, ‘Reason in Existence’, esp. section 4, ‘The Finitude and Ambiguities of Actual Reason’. 16 For this famous phrase, see Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a Bat’, in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 15

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Closer to home for dogmatic theology is the finitude of the human mind of Christ. Just how are we to treat this species of creaturely limitation and particularity? So urgent was this problem for the scholastic medieval theologians that they simply denied the ignorance of the created mind of Christ. Thomas Aquinas is careful in his depiction of this perfected state in the Redeemer, but he clearly affirms the created omniscience of the Lord in His earthly life.17 (Right on the surface of this doctrine we can detect the unease about ignorance as a finite, created state.) Now we moderns have declared such Christological omniscience contrary to the full humanity of Jesus Christ, a doctrine defined and enunciated at Chalcedon in the fifth century. Jesus of Nazareth is widely understood, in our era, to belong to the culture, worldview and limitation of His day, His people, His piety and practice. This we term his ‘full, historical humanity’. He was a firstcentury Jew, a Galilean, a man, a son of the commandment. We say these days that He was ignorant of many things, common to our store of knowledge today: particle physics, space travel, Tibetan Buddhism, the Equal Rights Amendment. But how does such an easy and confident affirmation of human ignorance square with Christ’s perfect sinlessness, a traditional and biblical affirmation about the Lord? How should Christians interpret the biblical account of Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman, for example, the human being He calls a ‘dog’? Is this ‘cultural limitation’? Is it the way a first-century Jew would address an outsider? Address a woman?18 Would we moderns take this biblical narrative as warrant for repeating that address to foreigners who call upon us? If we do not and should not – as I believe we should not – we stand plainly before the ‘problem of ignorance’ in the Person of Christ. Now these narratives in Matthew and Mark have long formed a ‘crux interpretationis’ and it may not strike the reader as determinative of the larger question about finitude in creaturely knowledge. So, we might turn rather to the broad condition of finitude known generally as the ‘scandal of particularity’. Can a Man, anchored fully in his era, bound to his culture and practice, finite and in this way ignorant of other times and cultures and miseries – can such a One truly save all people, all flesh? Sallie McFague is a modern theologian who dares frankly to say: No. But she by no means stands alone! Hans Urs von Balthasar, though rejecting clearly McFague’s answer, takes seriously indeed the question: Do We Know Jesus; Does He Know

See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, qq. 9–12. For the willingness to treat this event as a sinful act by Jesus, one corrected and guided by the Syro-Phoenician woman, see M. R. Arulraga, Jesus, the Dalit (Hyderabad: Volunteer Centre, 1996).

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Us? is the title of his short essay on this theme.19 Is the created finitude of Jesus’ life as Incarnate – His being there and not here, his knowing Lazarus and Martha, but not me (in a historical or earthly way), his particular historical being, among the elect people Israel – a barrier to His Saving Work, in every age, in every land? Now much complex, sophisticated dogmatic theology stands ready to address this very question; Karl Barth’s massive Doctrine of Reconciliation (Church Dogmatics, vol. IV) turns on just this axis, the Living Lord, present to His own, not just haec et tunc but also and gloriously, illic et tunc.20 But in our landscape, the ‘scandal of particularity’ gives voice to an unspoken dis-ease about finitude: our life is rounded by a little sleep; we enter into the past, and its place is no more. Just so we might explore more fully the reality of death, our Patristic concepts now firmly in hand. In one way, we might say that death is simply the clearest marker of finite being itself. What it means to be finite, we might say in this mood, is to be mortal, to have an end, to break apart. So firm is this intuition that Aristotle can quote it as premise for his most basic form of syllogism: All men are mortal. Mortality appears in this vein to carry both negative and positive traits. Living beings – to take the negative way first – do not live forever; they are not immortal or everlasting. Living beings are not themselves simples, not incomposite; rather finite creatures are made up of parts, organs, bits of tissue and ligament, bony skeletons or carapace, platelets and plasma, molecules and bundles of atoms. We are legion – finite being borrows life from many kinds, and parts, and substances. Such beings fall apart. The principle of unity or life – whatever we term this force – one day departs, and the complex reality of a creature collapses into distinct and decomposing parts. When viewed under this light we can see that death is entirely natural; it is the way of creatures. Human beings share this natural constitution with all created flesh. We break apart one day. Our hearts stop beating; our brains no longer pulse with current; our tissues no longer demand food and drink. The elements that compose a living, finite body once again emerge out of their service to life: a corpse is so much mineral and bone and corpuscle. Human beings, like all other organisms, are biological creatures; death proclaims our membership in this great family. Now, from one vantage, Christian dogmatics would be inclined to agree: death comes to all finite creatures, and this is the Creator’s good pleasure. Sallie McFague, Super Natural Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000); Hans Urs von Balthasar, Do We Know Jesus; Does He Know Us? (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). For Barth’s treatment of Christ’s particularity and Lordship over the ‘there and then’ and the ‘here and now’, see Church Dogmatics IV.3.1, §69, among many others.

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Consider, after all, what it would mean for Christian theology to deny that death is a created good, a natural end. The diversity, praised as God’s good gift above, would become nightmare very early in creation’s day. All kinds would be everlasting, in virtue of the individuals, themselves immortal. (We would have eaten of the Tree of Life, we might say.) There would be no seed-time nor harvest, as crops given for food would never grow old, ripen, and die. It may well be that young fawns and tadpoles would continue to pour forth from created bounty, but each would mature, never to enter senescence, never to return to the dust. In this sense, the first day after the first Sabbath would be the last on the Earth: no more history of creatures, their lives, their deaths and their progeny; only these first animals, brought to Adam, all alive forever. Perhaps we would see some human creatures directly moved into heavenly realms: the translation of Enoch, perhaps, or the chariot of Elijah, or as in Catholic dogma, the bodily assumption of the Virgin. (In Cur Deus Homo Anselm seems to entertain something of this kind for human creatures who ‘remain upright’, without sin.21) But in Holy Scripture these episodes are clearly seen as remarkable exceptions to creature’s natural end: All flesh is grass. But were living, finite beings to be by essence and definition imperishable, ‘translation’ would be the only end of a human life. Theologians would then stand before an odd mystery. Rather than attempting to fathom life, its fragile and perishable goods, we would face the astonishing miracle of death: how could anyone or anything die, we would ask. More significantly, we would consider the death of Christ the over-arching miracle of the Gospels. If Adam and Eve were created immortal, how much more the very Son of God! His death on the Cross would be the super-abundant miracle of Scripture, and His fear of it an astonishment. We might express this odd conclusion in another way: Christian theology wants to locate its miracles in the right place. That the Righteous would die for the ungodly; that the dead would rise; that sin could be banished by compassion and victory; that the hungry are fed from five loaves and two fish: these are miracles, theology traditionally teaches. That Jesus Christ dies for sinners: a miracle of grace. That He dies from cruelty, exhaustion and suffocation: an all too natural event. Death, in this way, seems properly natural, a created good, a negative property that marks us out as finite beings, dependent upon the Lord for our very breath. Death, too, could have a positive valence for Christians. We are not simply mortal, rather than immortal; composite rather than simple; time-bound rather than everlasting. Rather, we human beings live as those who know their own Briefly mentioned in Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, I.18.

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mortality: we are dust and to dust we shall return. Death could be received from the Lord’s hand as a gift, a grace. Such wisdom is the charism of the saints. The Canticle of the Sun, long attributed to St Francis, expresses this with haunting simplicity: Blessed be sister death, for by dying we enter into eternal life. And the saints of ordinary life – those people of special sanctity who bless our lives, but go unrecognized by Church calendars and sanctorals – these are often the ones who face death calmly, openly, fearlessly; often joyfully. Perhaps in pain, perhaps delivered and shielded from it, these common-day saints seem to simply lie down in the ground, to welcome their end, and pull the earth quietly around them. This is not Stoicism, not a pagan virtue. But rather it strikes us as a distinct, Christian grace: life is a gift for these faithful ones, and they yield it up as a gift, twice-given. Something of this positive value of death seems to have motivated Calvin’s strong endorsement of human death as determined explicitly and fully by Almighty God. Our end is determined, he wrote in the Institutes, and it is godless – he is that confident! – to attribute our death to accident, coincidence, tragedy.22 Or we might think of Karl Rahner’s more Heideggerian account of the positive value of death. It is, he writes, our ‘definition’, the moment in which we in truth become the person we are: rounded out, completely told as a tale, brought to our end. The traditional Catholic teaching of a final offer of grace, extended at the hour of death, follows on Rahner’s vision of death as creaturely definition. Only then can we make a final gesture toward our Creator, a welcome to grace or a bitter refusal, for we are ripe – ourselves, in truth – only then.23 But we have hardly touched on the reality of death when we have said all these brave things. For Holy Scripture plainly speaks of death as the Last Enemy. The apostle Paul is eloquent on this point, and the Corinthian correspondence rings out with the victory Christ has won over death, its powers and its dark realm. The apostle is reading Genesis as well: he shares the first-century Rabbinic teaching that death is penalty for sin, the curse visited on humankind for eating of the fruit of the garden. Death reigned from Adam to Moses, Paul writes; it does not take the Torah, and our rebellion against it, to make death a foreign power that crushes all the living. And though Augustine famously chided himself for his grief over his mother’s death, Christians have long known that death is the deepest, most intimate pain a creature can undergo, the tearing of the fabric of life.24 It may well be ‘better to have loved and lost, than never to John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.17.10, 11. Karl Rahner, The Foundations of Christian Faith (Spring Valley, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 1978) part III.3; part IX.2.; see also On the Theology of Death (New York: Herder & Herder, 1961). 24 See Augustine’s tears and the rebuke of them in book 9 of The Confessions. 22 23

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have loved at all’, as Tennyson famously wrote in his elegy for Arthur Hallam,25 but all those who live on after the beloved dies know a plain fact: death is wrong. It is painful; a penalty and curse; a kind of blasphemy against red-blooded life. No one who reads this essay needs to be told about the horror of permanent loss that is death; it is the most universal lesson, taught each day, always. And so it seems that finitude and death are both wrong and right, both curse and grace, both natural and deeply alien, both of God and His Goodness, and of sin, rebellion and enmity. How should Christian theology understand this startling, two-sided truth? Several voices speak for the tradition as a whole. We might for example consider finitude and death to stand both among the ranks of good creature and of sin to be a form of contradiction or dialectic; G. F. W. Hegel famously articulates such a vision in his Lectures on the Absolute Religion. Though an unreliable friend of Christian doctrine, Hegel is an uncanny and shrewd reader of Holy Scripture. Alone among his contemporaries, Hegel knew that Genesis somehow taught that nature was at once good and evil, at once ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, the good creature of God and sinful.26 We might incorporate into this large Hegelian temperament theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, for whom created life is ‘tragic’, a dialectic between sin and grace, finitude and eternity, or Paul Tillich, for whom the ‘condition of finitude’ reveals human life as caught in the contradiction between ‘essence and existence’, an insoluble tension he called a ‘theological symbol’.27 Or we might follow the pattern laid out by Karl Barth, in which finitude and death strongly belong to the gifts of the Good God; only the ‘second death’, the incursion of chaos and nothingness into the good creation, could turn these created gifts into the enemies and defilement of creatures. The metaphysical status of such incursions belongs to a ‘third category’, an irrational surd between proper, creaturely being and true non-being. Nothingness, Barth famously wrote, is, as that which is rejected by God. Against all these assaults of sin and corruption, Christ conquers, heals, sets free; just so the creature is to live her finite and bounded life in gratitude and gladness. Indeed, we might say that the line that divides Barth from his Neo-Orthodox near cousins – Niebuhr and Tillich, for example – is this pronounced voice of gladness, rather ‘In Memoriam’, Canto xxvii. For a sample of this dialectical and delicate reading of Scripture, see Lectures on the Philosphy of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), part III, ‘The Consummate Religion’, §B. 1. c, d, ‘The Story of the Fall’ and ‘Knowledge, Estrangement, and Evil’, pp. 442–52. 27 For Niebuhr, see among others Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960) and The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944); for Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, part II B: ‘The Ontological Elements’. 25 26



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than tragedy, that breaks forth from the Church Dogmatics as its ostinato. But we must reserve pride of place for Augustine and his rejection of Pelagianism. For it is not Augustine’s teaching on the human will, nor even his particular account of good works in the ordo salutis, that governs Christian teaching about finitude and death. Rather, the two-fold mystery of these creaturely elements, their sturdy givenness to all created reality, and their painful, intolerable, enmity to all creaturely goods, simply is the Doctrine of the Fall. This is the work it is set out to do. The double-sided quality of our limitation and end just is the account Augustine offers to Christian readers. An original creation, good and fruitful and joyful; a ‘second nature,’ infected in its very structure and root, a place of penury and need, of sorrow and imprisonment by death. Not our deeds but the furniture of our world, its very framework and nature, now speaks of contagion and defilement and loss. It is Augustine who allows Christians to say that finitude is both a created good, and an ignorance and penalty; that death is both natural, and the enemy the Risen Christ puts to flight. Just this, Augustine teaches, is the history of the created order, the ‘Two Cities’ that journey from Eden to the new Jerusalem, the unfolding of the history of our redemption.28 But perhaps the last word, truly, belongs to the apostle Paul, for he it is who taught Jew and gentile to speak of that ‘great mystery’, when corruption shall put on incorruption, the mortal immortality, and death ‘shall be swallowed up in victory’. So it is, Paul teaches, that in the end, through God’s great mercy, something gold does stay.

This theme is famously set out in Augustine, The City of God, especially books 9, 11 and 15–17.

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Principalities and Powers J. R. Daniel Kirk

Whenever Christians examine any aspect of sin, we are simultaneously interrogating some facet of Jesus’ saving work. In exploring the biblical notion of principalities and powers, we are examining the obverse side of the most foundational Christian claim, ‘Jesus is Lord’. To proclaim that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is to claim simultaneously that some other lordship has been supplanted.

Precedents for the New Testament Discussion Frequently within the biblical narrative we discover that power on earth is a manifestation of power being exercised in a spiritual plane. The plagues leading up to the exodus from Egypt are, in part, manifestations of Yahweh’s power over the Egyptian pantheon. When Joshua is preparing to lead the people into the Promised Land, an angelic being appears before him with drawn sword and identifies himself as commander of the army of Yahweh (Josh. 5.13-15).1 Some years later in the unfolding narrative, the Israelites carry the ark of the covenant into battle, hoping that it will function as a talisman, guaranteeing Yahweh’s presence and a victory in their battle (1 Sam. 4.3). When the Philistines win this battle and capture the ark, they place it in the temple of their god, Dagon. Dagon, it appears, has defeated Yahweh in battle, and therefore Yahweh must be brought in to worship Dagon (1 Sam. 5.1-5). But it is perhaps the book of Daniel that provides the clearest springboard for the notion of principalities and powers that forms a key component of the New Testament’s vision of Jesus’ work. There we find a first biblical glimpse of See G. B. Caird, Principalities and Powers: A Study in Pauline Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 1–11.

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what might be called an apocalyptic worldview. ‘Apocalyptic worldview’ is a way of speaking about the world as it is depicted in apocalyptic literature but is not confined to such literary expressions. Such literature narrates a revelation of present and future realities, usually by means of a heavenly agent.2 The vision disclosed typically is one in which time is heading for an eschatological consummation, and it is often one in which a seer is shown heavenly counterparts to events unfolding on earth. In Daniel, angelic figures not only disclose the unfolding plans of God they also fight other heavenly forces. An angelic power guarding Persia delays an angel sent to Daniel (Dan. 10.13). Michael fights for Israel in heavenly battle (Dan. 10.13, 21; 12.1). The significance of these celestial beings is illustrated in the victories and vicissitudes of the earthly people they represent. Israel on earth is victorious when Michael is victorious in the heavenly realm.3 Moreover, the Greek word that will come to be translated ‘principalities’ in the NT, exousíai, describes the angelic powers subjected to the Son of Man (Dan. 7.27). Other angelic rulers are dubbed árchontes in Daniel 10.13, 21 and 12.1, a term applied to ‘rulers’ both heavenly and earthly in the NT.4 Related to this, a recurring theme throughout early Jewish literature is that the suffering on earth experienced by the people of Israel, and/or their sinful actions, are manifestations of the fact that hostile spiritual powers are at work in the people’s land or the cosmos (e.g. Dan. 10; 1 En. 15.8-12; Jub. 10.1-12; 1QS I, 17; II, 19; III, 20-25). Demonic powers help to explain the condition of the world and of humanity’s place within it. Such powers might exercise their influence personally, leading persons into sin or sickness, or corporately, leading nations into injustice and barbarity. This is the seedbed within which NT claims about principalities and powers grow up.5 They develop within a worldview in which the powers of sin people confront every day are ascribed to forces larger than the sum of individual choices.

See the classic definition of John J. Collins in The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, rev. edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 5. 3 For further illustration of the role of angelic mediators in the life of Israel, see 1 En. 40. 4 Caird, Principalities and Powers, p. 12. 5 See Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). In a series of articles Chris Forbes has argued that Paul’s preference for abstract, metaphorical and quasi-personified depictions of powers (expressed in language such as ‘powers’, ‘height and depth’ and ‘sin and death’) over personal powers (such as angels and demons) demonstrates a greater indebtedness to neo-Platonic philosophy than to Jewish apocalyptic: ‘Paul’s Principalities and Powers: Demythologizing Apocalyptic?’, JSNT 82 (2001): 61–88; ‘Pauline Demonology and/or Cosmology? Principalities, Powers, and the Elements of the World in their Hellenistic Context’, JSNT 85 (2002): 51–73. It seems that Paul has creatively melded the philosophy with his apocalyptic worldview. 2



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Identifying the Powers ‘Principalities and powers’ (Eph. 3.10; Col. 2.15; Tit. 3.1, KJV) translates the words archai and exousíai. The Greek words are also paired in Ephesians 6.12 and Colossians 1.16. In Romans 8:38 the string, ‘principalities, powers’ (KJV) translates the slightly different, archai … dunámeis. More recent translations render these words ‘rulers and authorities’ (Eph. 3.10, NRSV, NIV) or ‘rulers and powers’ (Eph. 3.10, CEB). In addition to these words, the idea of heavenly potentiaries may be signalled by language of ‘thrones and lordships’ in Colossians 1.16 (thronoi and kuriotetes, respectively). Related to archai we also find the word árchontes in 1 Corinthians 2.6, 8. In Ephesians 6 the powers are called kosmokratoras, ‘cosmic rulers’.6 Rarely are these technical terms. The same words can be deployed both for heavenly forces and also for earthly governments. At times, it is difficult to determine which usage is intended. Additionally, study of the powers demands that we look beyond these abstract terms to observe how spiritual agents show themselves to be at work across various genres of literature in the NT. Principalities and powers are a way of speaking about any spiritual force that influences the events in the cosmos and also, at times, includes those instruments through whom the powers are at work.

Spiritual Enemies in the Pauline Corpus Principalities and powers in Ephesians The spiritual nature of the principalities and powers is clearly indicated in Ephesians 3.10. The passage delineates Paul’s mission as one in which a Jew plus Gentile people of God is a divine mystery now being disclosed, ‘so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places’ (NRSV). The redeployment of the phrase in Ephesians 6.12 strongly suggests that the powers in view are hostile: ‘For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’ (NRSV). These forces are subject to the command of ‘the prince of the power of the air’ (Eph. 2.1-2). For a helpful overview of the words, their meaning, and their deployment across the OT, Judaism and the NT, see Dan G. Reid, ‘Principalities and Powers’, in G. F. Hawthorne et al. (eds), Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (Downers Grove: InterVaristy Press, 1993), pp. 746–52.

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The discussion of principalities and powers thus opens up our understanding of the power of sin. In other places we learn that there are individual sins, that there is an individual’s struggle against sin, and that there are corporate manifestations of sin, larger than the sum of their parts. Here we have what might be considered an additional layer, or else an explanation behind those other manifestations of sin’s power: spiritual forces beyond humanity are at work to pull people away from the life of faith and salvation (Eph. 6.10-18).7 On the other side of the ledger, however, one of Ephesians’ opening salvos boldly proclaims that God has enthroned Jesus far above every principality and power (Eph. 1.21). Two conclusions ensue. First, the talk about heavenly powers is part of Paul’s salvation narrative, indicating one facet of the wide scope of Christ’s saving work.8 Second, in the already/not yet eschatology that pervades the NT, we see that Jesus is enthroned above the powers, ensuring their defeat, while those who are in Christ continue to struggle against these powers until their final disarmament. Reading Ephesians 3.10 and 6.12 in tandem opens up another, more particular, understanding of the nature of these cosmic powers. In Ephesians 3 a particular mystery is disclosed to them–a mystery whose specific content is the inclusion of Gentiles within the people of God (Eph. 3.6, 7). Earlier Paul had reflected on the inclusion of Gentiles with the Jewish people by speaking of Christ knocking down ‘the dividing wall of hostility’ (Eph. 2.14), and making one new humanity. With such claims in view, Paul’s statement in Ephesians 6 that ‘our battle is not against flesh and blood’ takes on new force. Any earthly division is a demonstration that the principalities and powers are at work, maintaining on earth the hostility that Jesus’ own body destroyed. In the words of Heinrich Schlier: ‘To proclaim the Gospel of peace is [an] expression of the struggle against the powers of evil.’9 The work of the principalities and powers, against which Paul summons people to fight, is first of all the work of division. Christ’s unifying work, bringing together Jew and Gentile in one new humanity,

The efforts of Wesley Carr, Angels and Principalities: The Background, Meaning, and Development of the Pauline Phrase Hai Archai Kai Hai Exousiai (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 42; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), to minimize the hostile character of such powers, including here, has rightly been critiqued and rejected by numerous NT scholars (e.g. pp. 98–9). 8 See also Guy Williams, The Spirit World in the Letters of Paul the Apostle: A Critical Examination of the Role of Spiritual Beings in the Authentic Pauline Epistles (Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 231; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), pp. 139–40. 9 Heinrich Schlier, Principalities and Powers in the New Testament (New York: Herder & Herder, 1961), p. 59. 7



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puts Paul’s gospel on display to show these forces that their time is come to an end. Once we recognize the earthly manifestation of the principalities’ and powers’ defeat, we also have the way opened to see that the church plays a role of signal importance. Like other Jewish literature, Ephesians indicates that the heavenly realm influences realities on earth. Only because the crucified Jesus has been raised up and enthroned at God’s right hand has a new reality been created in which people overcome the barrier of the dividing wall (Eph. 2.11-22); however, we see in the discussion of principalities and powers that the battle is bi-directional. Not only does Jesus’ heavenly victory secure a better earthly reality for the church, the church’s coming together is itself a power that participates in the eschatological victory of God over the hostile spiritual forces.10

Sin in Romans The idea that spiritual opponents battle against humanity’s flourishing on earth extends beyond the verbiage of ‘principalities and powers’ in Paul’s letters. In Romans, the powers are labeled ‘sin’ and ‘death’, and they work together against God’s plan for a humanity that thrives in righteousness and life.11 In Romans 5–8, sin functions as a hostile power. It is almost personified as Paul describes sin as something that entered into the world (Rom. 5.12), and is distinct from transgression inasmuch as it can reside in the world without a Law to govern its presence (Rom. 5.13-14). However, the presence of transgression, with the advent of the Law, increases sin’s power (Rom. 5.20). Paul’s discussion of the power of sin in Romans 5 quickly gives way to a focus on the power of death. While consistently maintaining a causal relationship between sin and death (e.g. Rom. 5.12; 6.23), the latter is described as a power in its own right. In 5.14 Paul says that death reigned from the time of Adam on. With this statement, Paul opens up to us one critical dimension of the work of Christ as he understands it. Jesus’ death on the cross is part of a cosmic conflict in which the kingship of the earth, and with it the kingship of the cosmos, is at stake. If there is going to be a righteous ruler upon the earth, not only death but sin itself must be dethroned (Rom. 5.21). In such a context, we are perhaps prepared to read of Jesus ruling as Lord, or of God’s ultimate kingship displacing the powers of sin and death. Paul, See Wink, Naming the Powers, pp. 90–2. See also James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 102–27.

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however, takes things in a different direction. His expectation is that with the dethroning of death, the way is opened up for those who are beneficiaries of Christ’s work ‘to reign in life’ (Rom. 5.17). Lying behind Paul’s assertion that people will reign because of Christ’s work is likely the creation story in which God’s intention for the world is that it be ruled by people (Gen. 1.26-28). The rule of principalities and powers, here denoted sin and death, is an anti-creation reality admitted into the world through Adam’s transgression (Rom. 5.12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19). The defeat of these powers entails the new-creation reality of a new Adam whose new humanity fulfils God’s original design (cf. 1 Cor. 15). The goal Paul articulates of a redeemed humanity ruling the world on God’s behalf in no way mitigates the centrality of Christ’s redeeming power as the means by which sin and death are defeated. Old humanity as subject to sin’s power is defeated and killed in Christ’s death, and the power of death is undone with Christ’s resurrection (Rom. 6.6, 7, 9). It is only through union with Christ that people can be free from the thrall of sin and death. Such freedom is, or should be, a reality in the lives of God’s people. Paul tells the Romans not to let sin reign in their body (Rom. 6.12), and instead to present their bodies to God as weapons of righteousness (Rom. 6.13). Here we see the marshal imagery that directed believer’s posture toward principalities and powers in Ephesians as well. These powers stand as cosmic opponents of God, and the flourishing of God’s people. God’s people, however, have been remade in Christ in such a way that they now walk by the Spirit rather than the sin-enslaved flesh (Rom. 8.5-11). The resurrection life of Jesus creates a new reality in which all of God’s children participate now, even as they await its consummation in the future (Rom. 8.10-17).12

Elementary principles of the world In both Galatians and Colossians we find reference to the elemental principles (stoicheia) of the world (Gal. 4.3, 9; Col. 2.8, 20). Chris Forbes has shown how this language has deep roots in Greek philosophical speculation, and that such deployment of it continued into Paul’s day.13 Typically, it refers to the elements that comprise the world (cf. 2 Pet. 3.10, 12). Paul, however, has personified such elements such that they, too, are depicted as ruling powers whose reign has Cf. J. R. Daniel Kirk, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). See Chris Forbes, ‘Pauline Demonology and/or Cosmology: Principalities, Powers and the Elements of the World in their Hellenistic Context’, JNST 85 (2002): 51–73.

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been incipiently curtailed through the cross. In Galatians, the powers function alongside of, and express themselves in, the power of the Torah. Thus, turning to Torah is a return to the very enslaving servitude from which Christ redeemed Israel (Gal. 4.3, 9). Analogously, in Colossians we find the elemental principles spoken of as enslaving masters in a metaphor of captivity (Col. 2.8); and, as in Galatians, Christ displaces such powers by providing an alternative lordship. Colossians also associates any return to these disempowered elements with observing peculiarities of the Jewish Law (Col. 2.11-17). Moreover, it is likely that such enslavement under the elements is what Paul has in mind when he speaks of the worship of the angels in Colossians 2.18. Paul appears to have creatively deployed a term that typically refers to physical elements as a reference to spiritual powers. Moreover, these powers are associated with the Torah as an enslaving power from which Christ’s death has freed people. The basic building blocks of the cosmos are thus described as having a particular concern to govern Israel until such a time as Christ takes away their power, being himself the true ‘body’ of which the earlier laws were but ‘a shadow’ (Col. 2.17). It may well be that this theology fits within a larger framework in which Paul is turning from the idea of Torah as that which might give a person the power needed to subdue the passions of the body to the Spirit of Christ as what plays that role.14

Of sin the double cure One final word about sin in Paul’s letters is important at this juncture. The current essay is focused on principalities and powers, an exploration that has us focused on sin, death and elements as the named powers that oppose and enslave humanity. In both biblical studies and theological explorations, such an assessment of sin is often held to be distinct, separate, or even categorically incompatible with, the notion of sin as guilt.15 For Paul, however, the two notions of guilt and power intertwine. Thus, in Romans 5.15 Paul speaks of sin leading to death (a power metaphor) versus God’s gift in Christ, but in the next verse, Romans 5.16, he speaks of sin leading to condemnation (a judicial metaphor) in contrast to a gift that leads to justification (another judicial metaphor). This, in turn, is followed by a statement about sin reigning versus grace reigning in Cf. Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale, 1994), pp. 42–83. See the discussion, for instance, in E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), pp. 434–42.

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Romans 5.17 (power metaphors); which, in its turn, gives way to a statement about transgression leading to condemnation versus obedience leading to righteousness in Romans 5.18 (judicial metaphors once more). A similar juxtaposition is found in Romans 8, which begins with a triumphant declaration that there is no condemnation for those in Christ (a judicial statement), but on the basis of a claim that people have been set free from the law of sin and death (a statement about enslaving powers). Indeed, these early verses of Romans 8 might well hold the key to discovering the unity between the conceptions of sin as guilt and power through Paul’s articulation of the converse, which is salvation as justification through union with Christ in his death and resurrection. The final triumphant declaration of Romans 8.31-39 asserts that God is the justifier, so that justification is assured for those who are in Christ – an assurance that expresses itself in the believer’s super-victory over the principalities and powers, and all other created things (Rom. 8.37-39). The overall picture of principalities and powers in the Pauline corpus is wideranging. Whereas in Ephesians these hostile forces work especially against the unity of the church, in Romans the vision expands to include every extrinsic force that compels people toward acts of sin and the reality of death that appears to have final say over the destiny of people. For Paul, the notion that death has the final say would be a concession to the ultimate power of sin and God’s inability to overcome it. Conversely, confessing the resurrection of Jesus requires God’s people to acknowledge that the great, seemingly insurmountable powers of sin and death are only penultimate, and have met their match in the work of God on humanity’s behalf. Romans articulates an expectation that Christ’s victory over sin and death both, through his death and resurrection, will begin to make itself felt here and now. Those in Christ can join God’s cosmic fight, defeating sin and death, by presenting their members as weapons for God’s battle against those powers that mar God’s good creation.

Satanic Opposition in the Gospels If the Pauline corpus leaves the hostile powers somewhat amorphous, even in naming them as sin and death, the Synoptic Gospels depict such enemies in much more tangible terms as the Satan and his unclean minions.16 In each of the See the respective discussions of Satan and Demons in Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), pp. 9–68. On the

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three Synoptic Gospels, Jesus’ public ministry does not begin in earnest until, after his baptism, he is tested by Satan in the wilderness (Mt. 4.1-11; Mk 1.13; Luke 4.1-13). We also read, in this context, of angels coming to serve Jesus (Mt. 4.11; Mk 1.13). Each writer also tells us that the same Spirit whom Jesus received at his baptism is the agent who propels him into the wilderness to face this trial. Thus, the narrative world of the Gospels is so established that the reader learns that whatever conflicts might ensue on the pages that follow are but an earthly manifestation of a spiritual battle, a battle centred squarely on the person of Jesus.17 The temptations themselves revolve around questions of power: Will Jesus exert his own power rather than trusting God’s provision? Will Jesus test God’s promised power of rescue? Will Jesus pursue power over all the kingdoms of the world through allegiance to Satan? This latter question demonstrates the close proximity between spiritual powers and worldly governments. As in OT precedents, the two are not neatly separated in the NT. Confrontations with demonic forces are a hallmark of Jesus’ ministry in the Synoptic Gospels. His ability to expel them displays both his own authority as God’s holy one and also his role as eschatological victor in the war between divine and satanic forces. The latter dimension is seen in the cries of the demons who fear destruction, especially in Matthew 8.29 when they ask if Jesus has arrived to torment them ‘before the time’. That ‘time’ and its torment are clarified later, in Matthew’s description of an everlasting fire as that which is prepared for the devil and his angels (Mt. 25.41). As Paul’s depictions of the powers entail a claim that Jesus’ death and resurrection have already ensured their eschatological defeat, so the Gospels’ depictions of Jesus’ exorcisms display both the presence of ruling power during Jesus’ life on earth and a sure sign of final eschatological destruction of these opponents who array themselves against both God and humanity.18 As with Paul’s expectations that God’s people will participate in the battle against, and victory over, hostile spiritual forces, so too the Synoptic Gospels depict Jesus’ followers sharing in his authority over malevolent spirits.19 He calls the twelve (Mt. 10.1; Mk 3.14-15) and empowers and sends them (Mk 6.6; Lk. 9.1) for this very purpose. Luke is most emphatic about the role that the contrast between Paul’s conception of the spirit world and that evinced in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, see Forbes, ‘Paul’s Principalities and Powers’. 17 For a thoroughgoing reading of Mark’s Gospel as a disclosing the spiritual forces behind earthly realities, see Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (New York: Orbis, 2008). 18 Cf. Schlier, Principalities and Powers, pp. 42–3. 19 Schlier, Principalities and Powers, pp. 53–68.

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disciples play in the eschatological cosmic conflict. Upon the return of the seventy-two from a missionary excursion, they celebrate that demons are subject to them. Jesus meets this celebration by saying that he saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning (Lk. 10.17-20). This is a symbol of Satan losing his place to accuse and war against the people of God from a heavenly perch. His fall to the earth is not his final defeat, but is a major victory, and one that is won through the exorcising work of Jesus’ disciples on the earth.20 The connection between earthly reality and heavenly power is here, as in the Pauline letters, bi-directional, so that earthly spiritual victories can influence the heavenly battle as much as the heavenly battle might bear earthly manifestations. In the ancient world, not only demon possession as such but also other manifestations of malevolent power on the earth might be ascribed to demonic forces. Thus, we find Jesus stilling a dangerous storm (Mk 4.39) by using the same command to silence that he issues to a demon (Mk 1.25).21 The storm is a manifestation of the demonic forces of chaos. Similarly, what we might call physical ailment was often seen as having spiritual cause. Jesus articulates such a connection when he heals a doubled-over woman whom he describes as having been bound by Satan for eighteen years (Lk. 13.16). With the temptation scene at its head and such signals about spiritual warfare punctuating the various manifestations of Jesus’ power throughout the story, the Synoptic Gospels might fairly be read as depicting the whole of Jesus’ ministry as the reign of God coming to displace the reign of Satan in all of its various manifestations. An important controversy between Jesus and his opponents provides further impetus for recognizing conflict with spiritual powers as central to Jesus’ ministry. The Beelzebub controversy unfolds as Jesus’ opponents accuse him of casting out demons by the power of the prince of demons. In response to the accusation, Jesus tells a parable: one can only plunder a strong man’s house if he first binds the strong man (Mt. 3.29; Mk 3.27; Lk. 11.21-22). The parable is richly evocative. It suggests not only that Jesus is exercising strength for the purpose of defeating a Satanic enemy, but also that the realm in which the force is exercised belongs to Satan in some sense. This hints at a larger mythology, visible also in Satan’s claim to be able to give the kingdoms of the world to whomever he chooses (Mt. 4.9, but esp. Lk. 4.6), in which Satan is the ruling force in this world. Jesus, then, in bringing the reign of God, comes to overthrow the reign of Satan, which he finds in place when his ministry begins (see also Luke 11.20). Cf. Caird, Principalities and Powers, p. 31. Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000), pp. 333–4, 339.

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With Satan and demons acting as personifications of the principalities and powers that rule the world, and Jesus’ mission depicted as disempowering these hostile forces, we are prepared to see how the overall atonement theology of Matthew and Mark address this problem. Perhaps the clearest indication of how Jesus’ death works in these gospels is the so-called ‘ransom saying’: ‘The son of humanity came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mt. 20.28; Mk 10.45). Ransom is a metaphor indicating freedom for those who receive it. Liberation of people from hostile powers will be the outcome of Jesus’ forthcoming death on a cross. John’s Gospel differs from the Synoptic Gospels inasmuch as John’s Jesus does not exorcise demons or face temptation in the wilderness. However, the notion of cosmic conflict is no less significant. In the course of Jesus’ ministry, he accuses his human opponents of being ‘children of your father the devil’ (Jn 8.44), and the narrator tells us that it is the devil who prompts Judas’ betrayal (Jn 13.1, 26-27; cf. 6.70). Such satanic opposition finds its final defeat in Jesus’ glorification. As the story transitions to the time of Jesus’ death, he says: ‘Now the ruler of this world is cast out’ (Jn 12.31). Later he claims: ‘the ruler of this world has been judged’ (Jn 16.11). Jesus’ Lordship, attained through the crucifixion, entails both a dethroning of the satanic ruler and the arrival of his eschatological condemnation. The Synoptic Gospels narrate the reality of principalities and powers under different names than those deployed in the Pauline corpus, but the reality is much the same. Demonic forces in the gospels act as the invisible agents behind the realities of this world that are enemies of human flourishing. However, in Paul’s letters they act upon the will of people and result in death, while the concern with an insurmountable power of sin is all but absent in the Synoptic Gospels. Notwithstanding, both the Gospels and Paul depict the defeat of such powers as lying at the heart of Jesus’ mission, a defeat begun with Jesus’ work in the past, and continued through the agency of Jesus’ followers. These victories manifest an eschatological reality inaugurated already by Jesus.

Hostile Spirits in Revelation The book of Revelation provides an apt transition from our discussion of principalities and powers as spiritual forces to that of such entities as geopolitical forces. For it is in Revelation that we see most clearly such connection between

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heavenly and earthly forces as is typical in both the Ancient Near Eastern and apocalyptic worldviews. One episode in the book where the conjunction between heaven and earth shines through clearly is the vision that runs from Revelation 12–14. It begins with a woman giving birth to a son and a dragon standing ready to devour the child as soon as he is born (Rev. 12.1-4). The child, however, is snatched up to heaven (Rev. 12.5). This is a thinly veiled rendering of the birth and ascension of Jesus. The image of the dragon, then, appears to have an earthly counterpart in either Herod’s attempt to slaughter the newborn baby, or Rome’s attempt to liquidate Jesus as a messianic pretender through crucifixion. However, the dragon is not simply an image for an earthly reality. He is a spiritual agent known as ‘Devil and the Satan’ (Rev. 12.9), who wars against the heavenly armies of God (Rev. 12.8), and exercises powers of deception upon the earth (Rev. 12.9). The dragon, in turn, is responsible for conjuring a beast from the sea that likely represents Roman imperial authority (Rev. 13.1–10). The conflict that unfolds in this passage reflects many of the same dynamics as the warfare seen in the Pauline corpus and Gospels. First, the dragon is defeated by the blood of the lamb (Rev. 12.11), so there is a definite Christological component to the warfare, and in one sense the war is won on behalf of the people through Christ’s agency. This theme is underscored when the Lamb appears with his army in Revelation 14. However, there is more to the victory. It is also won through the testimony of God’s people and through their willingness to be martyred for it (Rev. 12.11). The powers in Revelation take on geopolitical manifestations, and so the book encourages the churches addressed by the letter to endure even through persecution and death. Their deaths, if necessary, will help bring about the overthrow of their tangible, earthly oppressor. There are also (possibly related) manifestations of the hostile powers in idolatry, sexual misconduct, and economic exploitation. The battle fought in heaven, the victory won by the death of the Lamb, and the presence of God and Christ among the community all empower the churches to participate in the cosmic conflict manifest in their quotidian struggles.

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another, possibly related, strand of evidence as well. In a few instance, the same Greek words clearly refer to earthly governments – or to the spiritual powers at work through the world’s leaders. Twice in Luke’s Gospel we find the Greek word-pair arche and exousía. The first is when Jesus tells the disciples not to worry beforehand what they will say in their own defence when dragged before the synagogues or the ‘authorities and powers’ (Lk. 12.11). The second occurs as Jesus’ Jewish opponents are watching him so that they might find cause to deliver him over to ‘the authority and power’ of the governor (Lk. 20.20). On the one hand, these verses show us that ‘principality and power’ is not a technical term for hostile spiritual forces as such. On the other, the continued pairing of the same Greek words, in the same order, indicates that we are dealing with what appears to be something of an established way of speaking about governing powers.22 In this case, it is also worth noting that rule and power is a way of talking about the de jure power of the Roman government in contrast to whatever de facto power might be wielded by Jewish leadership. In both cases, the phrase depicts the Roman governors in distinction from Jewish authorities. Finally, it is perhaps not incidental that in each case the authority and power are imagined as hostile to Jesus’ followers and to Jesus himself, respectively. The phraseology is not deployed in a neutral manner. We might therefore tentatively conclude that the connection between principalities and powers as hostile spiritual forces and the deployment of the designation for human governments is not coincidental. Human governments may be the means by which such powers act. G. B. Caird reaches such a conclusion in his work on Ephesians, claiming: ‘The real enemies are the spiritual forces that stand behind all institutions of government, and control the lives of men and nations.’23 Such, indeed, appears to be the case in Paul’s claims about ‘the rulers of this age’ (oi árchontes tou aión toutou) in 1 Corinthians 2.6-8. There, he contrasts the wisdom of God with the wisdom of this age and its rulers. The latter are ‘passing away’, claims Paul – an indication that their defeat is part of the eschatological victory that has already been inaugurated with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Such characters are easily positioned on the cosmic map alongside the principalities and powers who exercise their rule now, but whose days are Wink, Naming the Powers, points out this usage in particular (e.g. p. 8) in order to uphold his larger point: ‘These powers are both heavenly and earthly, divine and human, spiritual and political, invisible and structural’ (p. 11). 23 G. B. Caird, Paul’s Letters from Prison: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, in the Revised Standard Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 91. 22

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numbered due to the advent of the reign of God’s messiah.24 Paul accents the disparity between the would-be wisdom of such rulers and the wisdom of God by asserting that their blindness to God’s wisdom led to them crucifying the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2.8). This statement points toward human agents as the powers in view, as does Paul’s subsequent claim that such blindness is in keeping with the notion that God’s plans have not occurred to human hearts (1 Cor. 2.9). The powers arrayed against the purposes of God are profoundly spiritual, and at the same time they manifest themselves in the actions of human governments.25 A final deployment of the twin terms archai and exousíai as earthly governments mutes any concerns about such powers’ hostility toward God or God’s people. Titus 3.1 issues a reminder to be subject to ‘rulers, authorities’ (archais, exousiais). This echoes Paul’s admonition in Romans 13 to be subject to the authorities (exousiais, Rom. 13.1-2), a mandate that finds its backing in God’s establishment of such powers. Such a mandate to submit to principalities and powers has struck a number of readers as incongruous with the broader NT witness to the nature of these powers as, largely, hostile toward God and God’s people. Perhaps a key to this paradox can be found in the depiction of such powers in the letter to the Colossians. There we read: Because in him were created all things in heaven and upon the earth the visible and the invisible whether thrones or lordships or principalities or powers All things through him and unto him were created. (Col. 1.16)

The parallelism of the second and third lines signals that the heavenly and invisible have their earthly and visible counterparts.26 Moreover, each is part of the created order, meaning that God has created them. The astonishing claim of the verse is that however hostile such forces may now appear to be, their original purpose is Christological: created in Christ, their responsibility is to participate in the ordering of all creation Christ-ward. However such powers might have gone astray in executing their charge, Christ is still their head (Col. Williams, The Spirit World, pp. 234–6, argues that these are angelic enemies; Carr, Angels and Principalities, pp. 118–20, argues that they are earthly rulers. In this case it may well be that we are dealing with a both/and. 25 Wink, Naming the Powers, draws the same conclusion in a much more comprehensive fashion, arguing that powers are always embodied, and that the spiritual aspect always has a tangible earthly manifestation. 26 Peter T. O’Brien, ‘Principalities and Powers and Their Relationship to Structures’, Reformed Theological Review 40 (1981): 1–10, argues that this phrase clearly refers to spiritual, heavenly powers; however, he does not explain how this accounts for the phrase ‘on the earth’. 24



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2.10). Like the powers of sin and death, these powers, marked as rebels against God’s purposes, have been disarmed in the death and resurrection of Christ (Col. 2.15); and yet, they still exercise considerable sway. Defeated by Christ, such figures are not to be seen as objects of worship (Col. 2.18); and yet, as forces heavenly and earthly show vestiges of their created purpose of keeping the world ordered under Christ, they might properly call for submission and honour.

Eschatological Victory Past and Future The New Testament confidently claims the disarming and defeat of the hostile spiritual powers that rule the earth. Such assertions arise from the notion that Christ’s death and resurrection accomplish the eschatological victory of God over all of God’s cosmic opponents. However, the NT writers by and large work with an inaugurated eschatology that still awaits its final consummation. Within this cosmic timeline, the final disempowering of the principalities still lies in the future. As noted above, Jesus’ exorcisms in Matthew are met with the complaint that he has come to torment the demons ‘before the time’ (Mt. 8.29), and in that book Jesus also speaks of a yet-to-come eschatological judgement in which the devil and his angels, and perhaps those who act on their behalf, will be sent to a lake of fire (Mt. 25.41). Jesus’ binding of the strong man is a harbinger of the eschatological destruction of malevolent spirits. These are manifestations of an overall soteriological programme of redemption. Paul’s vision of a future triumph is also thoroughly woven into his overall soteriology. Though Jesus is Lord, Paul recognizes that all things have not yet been subjected to him. There is an ongoing process in which Christ is destroying ‘every rule, and every authority and power’ (1 Cor. 15.24). Only after this is complete will all things be completely in subjection to him, and the Kingdom of God be prepared for God’s direct rule (1 Cor. 15.24-28). Such an eschatological narrative is part of Paul’s new creation theology in which humanity is restored to its place as ruler of the earth under God. Christ reigns as second Adam (1 Cor. 15.22, 45-49). His death and resurrection inaugurate the new creation. When death, the final power arrayed against humanity, is ultimately defeated, then the time of the principalities and powers will be truly abolished and the eschaton will have completed its arrival (1 Cor. 15.25-26, 54-57). Revelation, too, depicts the final destruction of Satanic power (Rev. 20.3, 10)

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as the consummation of the victory begun with Christ’s death and resurrection (Rev. 12.7-10). As noted above, Satan is thrown down from heaven through a battle in the heavenly places as God’s forces are strengthened through the blood of the Lamb. The final destruction of Satan and his angelic host, however, awaits the judgement scenes that follow in Revelation 20. There, the devil is thrown into the lake of fire (Rev. 20.10) and, in important continuity with Pauline expectation, Death and Hades are also thrown into it (Rev. 20.14). We thus find significant synergy around the notion that death is the ultimate hostile power that God defeats through Christ.

Conclusion As Walter Wink eloquently points out in Naming the Powers, the biblical depiction of principalities and powers grows up from a worldview that modern people, especially those in developed nations, find quite alien. We are used to naming evil as having its source in persons or institutions, but are wary of naming personal agents as active behind them. Indeed, there appears to be a clash of worldviews, evident any time we mentally translate ‘demon possession’ into mental illness or epilepsy. Be that as it may, the thoroughgoing depiction of hostile spiritual forces at work in the world names an important facet of reality as we continue to experience it today: the evil that yet awaits its defeat at the hands of God is greater than the sum of the individual acts of sin enacted by persons or institutions of the world. Naming these powers provides perspective and hope. It provides perspective on the enormity of the problem and the place and power of Christ’s work to overcome the evils that still beset us. It provides hope because it reminds us that the fundamental Christian confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ means that God’s plan for the cosmos, already initiated, is to finally defeat the powers that range themselves against the flourishing of humanity and of the earth. Ultimately, such naming of the powers provides hope for victory over the great equalizer of all humanity: death. The fundamental reality upon which the fundamental Christian confession is based is the resurrection of Jesus. Raised from the dead, Christ dies no more. Raised from the dead, he sits enthroned at God’s right hand, above all hostile powers. Raised from the dead, he assures us that his victory will be ours and we, too, will arise in defeat of death.

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Structural Sin Stephen Ray

While Christian discourse about sin often is given to focus on the actions of individuals – both as perpetrators of sin and as the objects of their actions – there is an entirely different dimension of sin that must be noted by theologians. This dimension is sin as it creates and exists within structures that shape the material reality of our planet and all life on it. Alternatively referred to as structural or systemic sin, this dimension of sin – while emanating as all sin does from the doings of human beings – specifically refers to workings of sin in the world in magnitudes beyond the scope of individual actions. Some would argue, as Reinhold Niebuhr did, that the larger working of sin has to do with groups as over and against individuals. While this is certainly a way that systemic and structural sin might be understood, I want to suggest that a more incisive way of thinking about the matter is by paying attention to when the systems created to visit ill-being on God’s creation become so embedded that they no longer need their creator to proceed. My way of thinking of this is when sin becomes the mundane. Conceiving of sin as the mundane is far from a simple gesture. Rather, it is the act of recognizing that sin can so inundate the fabric of things that every thought, every action, and the material conditions under which those thoughts provoke actions all proceed along lines that are in place because of the workings of sin. It is the recognition that sin ceases to simply masquerade as the natural order of things but actually becomes constitutive of this order. This way of describing the natural order of things is what I mean by sin as the mundane. The complexity of the matter is that while we are speaking about the unfolding of reality along expected lines, the conditions that created these lines of unfolding are anything but natural. Rather, they are the imposition of sin upon the material world, with its concomitant structuring of malformed

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material relations that by their very nature further the denial of flourishing and life within creation. While a situation that was clearly contemplated by both Paul and Augustine – namely, a world in which no part is untouched by sin – what we have to do with in considering structural sin is ‘the Devil’ inhabiting the structure of things such that evil is the norm rather than the exception. To say that evil is more often than not the norm is not to preclude that goodness and flourishing are present but rather to suggest that their appearance is never more than epiphenomenal. This is nowhere more apparent than in the doings of human beings. In the contemporary context we use words like oppression and terms like environmental degradation to describe the condition of material reality that is shaped by a human imagination that when effected inexorably leads to ill-being. Sin as structure is then means by which this ill-being is effectuated. While I could certainly go on building this theoretical scaffolding for the idea of sin as the mundane, it may well be that the best way to understand sin as structure made real by sin as the mundane is with an illustration followed by an excavation. To accomplish this task, I will first turn to a brief description of what in my estimation is a current situation that displays this working of sin: the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri in the United States beginning in August 2014. I then will follow with an account of what I believe to be the structural forces at work in this situation, paying particular attention to what I will term the corruption of the moral imagination.

Ferguson On 9 August 2014 at 12.03 p.m. or thereabouts, Michael Brown Jr. was killed by Darren Wilson, an officer with the Ferguson, MO Police Department. His body was left in the street for more than four and a half hours. While Darren Wilson was not indicted for the killing of Michael Brown Jr., a deep divide continues to exist over whether Wilson murdered Brown or simply shot him in self-defence. The fault-line runs along the troubled history of race in America. The divided response was amplified by the militarized response of law enforcement when a multiracial, though predominantly Black, group of protestors began daily protests demanding that what they termed racially discriminatory policing which led to the fatal encounter be addressed. A United States Department of Justice report largely corroborates the claims of the protestors.1 The protests in Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice, Investigation of the Ferguson Police

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Ferguson continue unto this day and a larger nationwide movement has grown from them, focused around the declaration that ‘Black Lives Matter’. I choose the events in Ferguson to illustrate sin in the mundane for several reasons. The first is that while this particular killing of an unarmed Black person sparked a broad outrage that has given life to what many term the new Civil Rights Movement (Black Lives Matter), the situation itself is far from unusual. News reports in the United States feature almost weekly reports of such killings. Recently, many of these killings are filmed on cell phone cameras, and this video record often has provided evidence that the police accounts of the event could not be corroborated. What these on-going killings by police across the nation of unarmed Black people and the public response has revealed is the ferocity of anti-Black animus, both in law enforcement and in general public opinion. There is but one word for it: evil. By calling this situation evil I am presuming a Christian conviction that all lives have value and matter. In this and many other cases, the inapplicability of this conviction to Black people is apparent. This is why I call it evil. It is also why I think it opens a door for us to begin to explore the textures of discerning structural sin or sin as the mundane.

The Idea of Race The first step in rendering an analysis of how it is that sin is at work in the everyday and everywhere diminution of Black life is by identifying the quotidian circumstance which enlivens this entire narrative: namely, the idea of race. I say circumstance because from the outset I need to be clear that race is not something that is but rather something that happens. Noting this distinction draws us into glimpse of sin as the constitutive structure within which the idea of race exists and does its work. That glimpse is of the nature of race as a category that continually masquerades as being of the nature order of things and then masks itself as something other than the workings of sin. That race is something born in the multiple ways of Western culture legitimating the evil visited upon Black and Brown bodies in modernity (i.e. chattel slavery and genocidal practices again indigenous populations in the Americas) is beyond question.2 Similarly, the synthetic and perennially mutable character of the notion is likewise made clear in any number of works across disciplines. Department (Washington, DC: 2015). Elaine A. Robinson, Race and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2012).

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So, then, what we glimpse here is that race is a notion, not a thing. Granted, it is a notion that shapes material reality is consequential ways; but it is a notion nonetheless. How then did this notion – which I argue was conjured by the rationalizing needs of an enslaving genocidal social project – come to be taken as the natural order of things? The answer, simply put, is that even though race is not ontological in its own character, it creates its own ontology which imbues the fabric of American life and culture. A way to think about this situation, therefore, is to understand race as a social ontology. We can work out this idea by gaining a sense of the concept of ontology. While there are certainly complex definitions that can be provided for this concept, for our purposes a working definition might be this: an ontology is a description of the structural character of a given reality, as it exists. That is to say that it is an interpretation of the necessary nature of things for a given reality to exist as it does. So, then, to say that race is a social ontology is to contend that it is one of the presumptive categories that is assumed for our society to exist as it does. While there are certainly others, it is an inescapable reality that the notion race has been a constitutive thread in the fabric of American society from its beginnings. To reiterate the gravity of identifying race as a social ontology, let us recall how Edward Farley describes the extent of the social: The social is the environment that is already present to shape individual agents and interpersonal relations as they come into existence. Accordingly, it constitutes the concrete context or matrix of all agendas, shapes all interpretations and generates all discourses. We human beings know ourselves and our world only through an already formed sociality that contains institutions, languages, customs, and norms.3

The social in this rendering is the space in which the imagination imposes upon the material universe already thematized meanings and interpretations resulting in the creation of what we commonly call reality. Moreover, the social is the space within which interpretations of material reality continue to exist and signify contemporary existence. An implication of this understanding of the social is that if some imaginative construct becomes embedded within the social, it gains the power to signify a particular reality and all of those who inhabit it. Precisely because the social is all-encompassing, this power of signification affects institutions, languages, customs and norms. Edward Farley, Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), p. 47.

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With this understanding of the significance of race as social ontology in hand, it becomes clear that, with the construct of race, we have to do something that structures the very way we receive and interpret the experience we call reality. Far from the simplistic interpretations that view racial identification as merely some statistical categorization, this interpretation understands race to structure the very way bodies and the communities they constitute are received and ‘placed’ in the commonsense that characterizes society. By ‘placed’ I mean the way humans are structured into a given social according to the morphology of the bodies with which they exist. They are ‘placed’ not only in the contemporary context, but also historically and proleptically. It is precisely here that the chain of killings by of unarmed Black people – which carries forth a long history of the extinguishing of Black life at the hands of official and unofficial actors – exposes several of the textures of the operation of race as a social ontology. In the first instance, a vast majority of these encounters begin with the Black bodies being displaced. By ‘displaced’, I mean they are in spaces deemed inappropriate by authorities, official and provisional, who extinguished the lives of these Black people. More often than not the dead did little to warrant a lethal response. This displacement then turned on the inescapable observation that the bringers of death were responding to an interpretation of the bodies of the persons they would kill, and only secondarily to any actions which they may have been engaging in. In the second instance, the immediate escalation to lethality relative to the nature of the encounter demonstrates that actions were interpreted by who is doing them; more precisely the melanin content of the doer. Another texture which is made evident is the way that these deaths – and in the case of Michael Brown, the community response of protest – are woven into narratives which not only reconstruct the past in ways which legitimate the killing but, also fix the future by precluding the possibility that a human being of worth with a future was killed. Usually, the narratives are rooted in tropes of criminality and menace. I will return to more full explicate this matter of Black death exposing the working of sin as the mundane. For now, I mention these two textures as a reminder of the narrative thread of this article.

Exclusivity and Dominance The next step in explicating this imaginative framework is to identify the explicit ways that this ontology is appropriated as formally organizing principle for the

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social. At this point two ideas are useful to this analysis: mutual exclusivity and necessary dominance. The first is a principle and the second a noetic practice of presumption. Generally, they are rendered as inherent deductions about the character of American (and human) society given the ontological character of race. They function as a derivative of some form of natural law. The first principle of mutual exclusivity represents the codification of an understanding of race that is binaristic in nature. It is the belief that black and white form two opposites in terms of human development and existence such that they quite simply define human being. The one represents the epitome of human development, the other its opposite. This view perceives the difference represented by race as being immutably a part of the natural order of things. One cannot at once be both white and black. The ‘ontological’ character of race excludes this possibility. As with the other characteristics of race, while immutability may be construed in different ways, the outcome is the same: inescapable difference. Racial identity then becomes a fixed feature of social reality, even in circumstances when it is necessary to create new categories to maintain the basic structure and logic of the category (i.e. the recent bi-racial designation). The second noetic practice represents the legitimization of material relations fixed in the category of race. That is to say, the category becomes significant as an explanatory tool for making some – usually moral – sense of the evolving system of racial oppression, exclusion and lethality. The principle of necessary dominance takes as a given that racial oppression, as such, cannot be explained by a simple analysis of historical rationalizations for imperialist and colonial expansion and subjugation. For that would mean that difference interpreted as race could to be reducible to the workings of hegemony. No, there must be a more compelling reason. That reason was sought in the very nature of racial groups themselves. As Thomas F. Gossett points out in his book Race: The History of an Idea in America: One does not have to read very far in the writings of nineteenth-century social scientists to discover the immense influence of race theories among them. In studying human societies, they generally assumed that they were studying innate racial character. Races were thought to represent different stages of the evolutionary scale with whites – or sometimes a subdivision of the white race – on the top. Accordingly, any given society represented the power and influences of its various racial stock.4 Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 144.

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What this observation does is to identify the intersection of the imaginative world of race and the very real world of American society committed to hierarchal dominance as an organizing principle in the social. In sum, this type of reasoning inevitably led to the conviction that white dominance of Blacks was an evolutionary necessity. The system of racial dominance and oppression was therefore only a recognition of a reality categorically written into the fabric of nature.5 In the contemporary context the language of dominance does not have the same currency as in earlier times. Rather, it has transpositioned into the language of accomplishment and aptitude. That is to say, the rationalizing discourses of our day which seek to explain the perennial difference in life outcomes – such as those of wealth, health, and the vibrancy of communal institutions – focus squarely on the deficiencies of Black people and our communities denominated in terms of work and values. The point is that, whether it is the language of necessary dominance of the nineteenth century or the lack of industry in Black culture in the twenty-first century, the conclusion is still the same: the condition of Black people and our communities is woven into the natural order of things.

The Material Power of Oppression Before continuing, allow me to give material content to what it is that I mean by the concepts racial oppression and disparate life outcomes. Perhaps, the best place to begin is with the history of exclusion attendant to most of American history. This residential and commercial exclusion of Black persons from the spaces of economic opportunity and material well-being which was frequently violent – yet always state sanctioned – is perhaps the most constant thread which runs through the racial history of the United States. Whether we are considering the physical conditions of educational institutions or the geographic location of residential communities relative to economic opportunity and cultural flourishing, the history of this nation has demarked the appropriate spaces for Black persons and communities are ones of exclusion.6 Put another way, decrepit and underfunded schools that prepare children for an economy which

George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), Chs 2 and 4. James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: The New Press, 2005).

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no longer exists,7 structurally dilapidated communities distant from economic opportunity and surrounded by environmentally threatening industries or their remnants, whose physical and economic condition breeds crime and despair, are taken to be the natural condition of Black people, thereby leaving unquestioned the ways that fiscal policy, housing practices and extra-legal violence have created these conditions, again and again. Directly related to these realities of exclusion are yawning gaps in life outcomes between Black and white communities. So, whether we consider the most basic outcome, life expectancy,8 or the outcomes which most influences opportunity and well-being, economic wealth,9 the persistence of these disparities give lie to suggestion that it is something other than structural forces which beset Black persons and communities for the benefit of white ones. The realities to which I point are and have been a demonstration of the materiality of sin in the structuring of the social, in which life proceeds in the United States; an unfolding of the racial imagination forming a set of natural laws that becomes the organizing principle for American existence. The point of identifying these material realities in a piece about the workings of sin is twofold. First, as has been apparent throughout this chapter, is the realization that sin becomes apparent in structures through the material consequence of their operation. Another way of putting it is that sin works through structures to inscribe itself on the bodies and souls of persons and communities as ill-being and death. The second reason is that, because the evidence of sin’s presence is usually undeniable, it effectively shields itself from scrutiny and intervention by constructing ideological formations that take the presence of ill-being and death as simply the natural order of things. If we are to take seriously the operation of these cloaking discourses it requires attentiveness to the operation of the extra-personal and its impingement on the material. As a theologian, I have found Paul’s schema of powers and principalities particularly helpful when making sense of the workings of ideologies of ill-being and death and interrogating the material relations which they create that mal-form every dimension of our existence including the very earth we inhabit. ‘For we are not contending against flesh and blood’, Paul says, ‘but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Broadway Books, 2012). 8 Lauren F. Friedman and Katie Jennings, ‘The U.S. Has a Staggering Gap Between Black and White Life Expectancy’, Business Insider (21 April 2014). 9 Laura Shin, ‘The Racial Wealth Gap: Why a Typical White Household Has 16 Times the Wealth of a Black One’, in Forbes (26 March 2015). 7



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present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places’ (Eph. 6.12). While there are numerous ways that text has been interpreted, nearly all commenters agree that Paul is concerned here to identify forces beyond the material that exert power and influence on human affairs in ways that cooperate with iniquitous systems of temporal rule. The goal of these ‘powers and principalities’ is minimally to hinder the flourishing of God’s children and maximally to fix the rule and dominion of Death over all that has life. This scheme that Paul describes – of cooperating material and immaterial forces whose goal is the refutation of God’s purposes in the world – is particularly appropriate for a theological analysis of the workings of race and structural sin because it allows a way to theologically make sense of realities which are otherwise left to examiners of ideology and the like. In its functioning as a social ontology, race bears the marks of being a power. Its primary space of existence is in the immaterial realm of human consciousness, where it works to structure reality through the imposition of an interpretative lens through which we see reality and formulate our responses. Or, put differently: race as a social ontology is an extra-personal force whose dominion is exerted through the ideational and spiritual structures of human consciousness as it accretes material reality to itself through the erection of edifices whose primary aim is subjugation, and finally its workings are debilitating to God’s children and, by extension, to all creation. The primary characteristic of the American category of race is that it attaches itself to persons as a principle of generalization that subsumes individuals into an ideational category. It lays a matrix of understanding onto the material bodies of human beings. Race therefore functions primarily in what Plato thought of as the world of forms. It is extra-personal. A second characteristic is immediately related to this primary one. Because the idea of race is laid somewhat as a map of the terrain of human bodies, the grid through which we see them motivates our response to those bodies. So, the idea of race gains life and power as it becomes a compass for navigating the terrain of human interactions and relations. The routine killings of unarmed Black people by police are interactions that traverse just this terrain. In this sense, the idea of race makes it impossible for us to see the world apart from the interpretative scheme it provides. Its dominion is exerted through the ideational and spiritual structures of human consciousness, and we respond emotionally and materially to what we ‘see’ ideationally and spiritually. American chattel slavery, the Black laws of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jim Crow of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, residential segregation, urban

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isolation, irascibly separate and unequal systems of education and healthcare, disparate immigration policies for European and ‘Third World’ nations are but a few of the institutional realities of American public life which are the material accretions of race imposing itself upon our reality. The idea of race accretes material reality to itself through the erection of edifices whose primary aim is the subjugation of life. Finally, it is an undeniable situation that as race functions in American everyday order of things it motivates systems that destroy the bodies and communities of the poor and of people of colour as it destroys the humanity of those who unjustly gain privilege in this system with the final result that the physical landscape of creation is marred by the structures of ill-being imposed on racialized bodies.

The Principalities and Imagination To this point, I have been focusing on the idea of race as power. It is necessary to take a further step to speak of race in relation to the idea of principalities. In the interpretation I am working with principalities are those systems of thought, interpretation and material relations that work to impose the dominion of a power upon human reality. They are what I have previously referred to as the material accretions of the powers. Let me for a moment identify how each of these characteristics is seen in the exertion of the power of race in our material reality. It is apparent to any observer of American society in both its historical and contemporary forms that the racialization of human persons is not a value neutral proposition. Rather, value is assigned along a continuum of colouration, with unearned privilege migrating to the lighter end of the spectrum and unearned disadvantage and suffering to the darker end. Placement on and along this continuum quite literally is the difference between life and death. Recognizing this continuum of valuation allows us to see the dynamism which is attendant to the workings of race, which may be elided in binaristic interpretations while yet not losing their insight that white and Black are socially constructed in such ways that flourishing and disadvantage migrate specifically between them. This migration entails not only the flow of material and intangible well-being but also culturally produced phenomena such as scrutiny by police and paralegal forces (i.e. Community Patrol member George Zimmerman and the Oathkeepers). Another dimension of the light–dark continuum is that it is applied as a discourse of inherency using the trope of culture. This particular discourse



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overlays the categories of acceptable and aberrant, with the effect of rationalizing intent of ascribing the unearned flourishing of light communities as being a direct result of their enactment of normative acceptability and not the workings of unjust systems, and correlatively, the unearned suffering so persistent in dark communities the result of aberrant cultural practices. The unspoken yet most pernicious part of this discourse is its reliance on the earlier mentioned logic of inherence. So, while it is entirely possible to demonstrate that economic calamity and social stigmatization which has dogged the history of Black people can be substantively explained by taking note of the various legal and cultural regimes which proscribed an inferior place for Black persons and communities throughout American history, this discourse places the blame for our calamity squarely on the shoulders of a deficient Black culture. Moreover, this particular epistemological turn (of knowing Black people better than they know themselves and thus, being able to diagnose their condition better than they can) instantiates the recognition of presumptive racial characteristics that follow the logic of inherence. So, behaviours, personal and communal, represent something more than situational responses to conditions and events. They are held to be disclosive of the true character and ‘values’ of communities the preeminent example in the historical moment which provokes this article being the obsession of so many white people with the limited occurrences of looting during the initial protests after the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson. While by any measure the ‘looters’ were an absolute minority of those protesting (tens of them, thousands of others), they became the symbols of Black protest for many in the media and more broadly in the white population of our nation. Even during the protests which erupted on the anniversary of the killing, the focus of many remained on the ‘looters’ even though there was not a single documented case. The centrality of the ‘looter’ in imaginations of too many white Americans has little to do with reality and everything to do with this logic of inherent aberrance. As with every other dimension of this continuum, inherence is not value free but functions in a way to stabilize the material manifestation of this continuum which bestows unearned flourishing and suffering. In light of the above, we might then think of the continuum outlined here as ideational accretion around which material expressions of its working constellate themselves. Before proceeding, it may be helpful to clearly outline the multiple discursive relations and recall their connection to the theological scheme being deployed throughout this piece. The basic claim of this chapter is that sin structure, or structural sin if you like, is best understood with the idea of sin as the mundane.

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This phrasing seeks to identify the situation in which sin has become so much of the everyday character of life that the reality it shapes seems to be the natural order of things. It is precisely this masquerade that allows sin to so shape the materiality of creation that the dominion of ill-being and Death is furthered. We then turned to a description of a discrete way that this functioning of sin is disclosed, and the chosen heuristic device was the notion of race. Through interrogating the workings of race as that of a social ontology, I have contended that it functions to shape material reality by signifying our perceptions thereof and thereby conditioning our response, most notably to racialized persons. I have further identified a means by which this was accomplished: namely, through the ideational construction of a continuum along which unearned flourishing and unearned suffering modulated between two poles: light/white and dark/Black. A significant dimension of the functioning of this modulation was the assignment of value to persons and their communities based upon specious epistemologies of inherence that were directly related to discourses of acceptability and aberrance. These discourses then rationalize the material functioning of the modulations along the continuum in ways normalize the bestowal of flourishing and suffering as being the natural consequences of the natural inclinations of light/white and dark/Black communities, thereby rendering their respective flourishing or suffering as simply being a part of the natural order of things. Put another way, the operation of the modulations are simply the mundane. And these modulations are sin at work in the world. By giving content to what I mean by race as a social ontology – and then using this definition as a vector through which to explain how sin is able to disfigure the materiality of creation – I can now unfold several ways this recognition enables us to speak about the systemic devaluation of Black life in ways that are theologically significant. Furthering this conversation will entail some reflection of the ways that the moral imagination becomes corrupted by the workings of the preceding dynamics and how this corruption then leads to the material practices which extinguish Black life, particularly at the hands those charged to ‘protect and serve’ society. The moral imagination as I employ the term refers to the sensibility – or better, the web of sensibilities – by which persons and communities make discernments and navigate the material world in ways consonant with their understandings of right and wrong, good and evil. While we can certainly specify the shades and textures of what is behind the reasoning that enlivens a particular imagination, this compact understanding is sufficient for our purposes. The feature of the moral imagination to which I want to bring our



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attention is the reality that it is both shaped by a particular field of vision and effectuated in ways that contemplate a certain range of responses as valid and possible. By range of responses, I mean an array of actions that are conceived as effectible. Particular moral imagination becomes apparent either by the actions that are engaged in by individual agents or by our assessments of their actions. It seems clear, then, that the consistent performance of actions by those charged with our common well-being which dismissively extinguish Black lives and then are broadly applauded as being appropriate display something of the moral imagination of many in our nation in relation to the value of Black life as such. While the Calvinist in me wants to agree with my mother in her assessment of the proneness of most white people to be less than good actors when it comes to the well-being of Black people (her phrase to give this sentiment voice: ‘Eh, white folks. Some is different, most ain’t’), the Augustinian in me knows the matter cannot be left there. So, the question arises for me just what is it about the moral imagination of so many that leads to a vision of the material world in which Black life means so little? The first move must be to frame the question in terms of the corruption of moral imagination. To do otherwise would presume that the moral imagination on display in the killing of Michael Brown and by the many others who supported the deed is bereft of the capacity to appreciate Life as life, and only has appreciation for life that upholds a truncated vision of normativity. If we are dealing with a corrupted moral imagination, then we must ask: by what means did this imagination come to be? Let me be clear that, as a theologian following the insights of Augustine, I believe that the moral imagination of humans is prone to corruption simply because of the ubiquity of sin. I would go even a step further to agree with Reinhold Niebuhr that this has everything to do with our finiteness (our limited vision of matters of consequence because we are bond by time and space). The edge that I put on each of these is that in recognizing the fallenness of the moral imagination that emerges from the inescapably parochial character of human existence, we must also recognize that the corrupted moral imagination takes particular shape and form in different epochs of human history. It is not something which ahistorical generalization helps us to understand. There is no general fallenness that does not take discrete historical materialization in human societies, in the specific shapes of those societies, using its customs and mores. It should be clear the particular corruption of the moral imagination that I have in view: namely, the moral imagination whose field of vision takes the routine extinguishing of Black life by the police as the natural state of things.

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Using the discourses I have hitherto identified (race as a social ontology and the continuum of flourishing and suffering this ontology creates) we might begin an analysis of the corruption of imagination with which we are concerned by noting that it is inextricably anchored in the first instance by the notion of race. In substantial and significant ways the particular imagination is conditioned such that racial identity either amplifies or diminishes the claims of conscience based upon the modulation of the continuum along which flourishing and suffering, acceptability and aberrance are produced. The specific modulation that concerns us here is the presumption that attaches to Black persons that in the natural state of things aberrant behaviour that warrants police scrutiny is to be routinely expected. Thus, no scrutiny of Black persons is undue and unwarranted. Whether this scrutiny is enacted by irregular authority like the community watchman George Zimmerman or an official authority like Darren Wilson, the presumption is that it was warranted. Here it is important to note that standing behind this particular modulation of the continuum are all of the dehumanizing discourses clustered around the Black body which first authorized the abomination that was the system of chattel slavery, and then the demonic system of lethal peonage that was Jim Crow, and the regime of terror unleashed against Black people in the decades-long campaign of lynching. Or, to put it another way: the expectation of aberrant behaviour warranting scrutiny is one of the more significant rationalizing discourses evolved to justify the lethal scrutiny necessary to maintain the systems of chattel slavery and Jim Crow. Any attempt to identify what it is in the discourses on which we are focused that gives rise to this particular wrinkle in the corrupted moral imagination will necessarily note the preeminent place of race as social ontology because it is in its power of signification that Black bodies, as such, are interpreted as drawing scrutiny apart from any activities in which they might be engaged. Recall, as well, that the majority of lethal encounters that have unfolded between unarmed Black persons and the police began with unnecessary and frequently unwarranted stops by the police. Continuing with our analysis of this particular corrupted moral imagination leads us then to ask what particular accretions of its malignancy cluster within material reality? Immediately, we must note the contemporary reality of mass incarceration that encourages explicit scrutiny of particularly young Black bodies.10 As well, the particular financial incentives present in places like Michele Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012).

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Ferguson, MO for the ‘overpolicing’ of Black persons bear notice. An additional element is the material accretion is residential segregation. Because much of the twentieth century was a history of the sometimes violent creation of white spaces with every trace of Black presence expunged, the cultural common sense which evolved was that there were many spaces in our public and residential life as a nation that Black persons simply did not belong, a signification of law enforcement then became the maintenance of these spaces through aggressive corralling of Black bodies into designated spaces. Beyond the violation of rights and common sense moral vision, the spaces of corralling more often than not provide significant potential for the production of profit linked directly to the imposition of misery on the Black persons locked into those places, whether they be prisons or ghettoes. Finally, these spaces enhance the possibilities for the range of suffering which is continually on display to flourish in the midst of Black people largely unabated and in ways from which our common systems of public life can wash their hands.

Conclusion Within the schema that has framed the excavation that is this chapter, the importance of describing the contours of the corrupted moral imagination should be clear. It is the imagination that precedes either acts of malice or the systems that normalize the suffering of its regular objects that its enactment is no longer understood to be malicious but simply a natural response to an encounter with routinely violable persons and communities. The enactment of malice becomes mundane. I have shifted language here to that of malice because as this term works in American culture, its connection to ill-will, which is the desire to do evil unto some other person or community, is more explicit than the language of sin. Substantively, they share a conceptual familial relation, but sin has come to be deployed to refer to so much that its capacity as an incisive conceptual tool to get at anything in particular has been blunted. So, while I began this piece with the promise of giving content to the idea of sin as the mundane as a way of explicating sin as structure/structural sin, my underlying motive was to offer an analysis that would create the possibility of introducing a common concept which yet, even in its banality, offers a way to understand the gravity of things pondered within. I am unconvinced that the language of sin can adequately make sense of a cloud of Black death at the hands of authorities of different strip because it, like the term ‘racism’, has become so thoroughly

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domesticated that ambiguity is its greatest feature. Malice, on the other hand, recalls for us the central place of ill-will and has the capacity to illumine the structures which make its enactment mundane. Michael Brown Jr. was killed by the hand of one charged with our common welfare because Darren Wilson had malice in his heart. It was the type of everyday mundane malice that takes Black life and ways of being human to be aberrant and therefore eminently extinguishable. If there is a more immediate example of the dominion of Death than facilitation of a society in which some lives do not matter, then I do not know what it is.

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The Sinner and the Victim George Hunsinger

Over the course of the past century, Christian theology has increasingly witnessed the rise of victim-oriented soteriologies. The plight of victims, variously specified and defined, has been regarded by prominent theologians as the central soteriological problem. It can scarcely be denied that the bloody history of the twentieth century has brought the plight of victims to the fore. Nor can it be denied that Christians have too often seemed ill-equipped to bring the plight of victims, especially victims of institutional oppression and social injustice, clearly into focus for themselves so that reasonable and faithful remedies might be sought. Victim-oriented soteriologies have undoubtedly made an important contribution to a better understanding of the church’s social responsibility. Polarizations and animosities developed, however, to the extent that the plight of victims displaced the soteriological plight of sinners, or even eclipsed it. Victim-oriented soteriologies tended to define the meaning of sin entirely in terms of victimization. In effect, sin ceased to be a universal category. It was defined almost exclusively in terms of perpetrators or unjust institutions. Since by definition victims qua victims were innocent of being perpetrators, they were to that extent innocent of sin. If sin attached only to perpetrators, however, victims could be sinners only by somehow becoming perpetrators, or at least collaborators, themselves, a move not unknown in victim-oriented soteriologies. With their polar opposition between victims and perpetrators, victim-oriented soteriologies arguably displayed a logic with sectarian tendencies. How the cross of Christ is understood by these soteriologies is worth noting. The cross becomes significant mainly because it shows divine solidarity with the victims, generally ceasing to retain any other relevance. (In extreme cases, the theology of the cross is denounced as a cause of victimization. However,

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such denunciations, when meant de iure, exceed the bounds even of heterodoxy and so cease to be of constructive interest to the church.) The cross, in any case, is no longer seen as the supreme divine intervention for the forgiveness of sins. It is not surprising, therefore, that more traditional, sin-oriented soteriologies should react with unfortunate polarization. When that happens, sin as a universal category obscures the plight of oppression’s victims, rendering their plight just as invisible or irrelevant as it was before. Atonement without solidarity then comes to exhaust the significance of the cross, and forgiveness takes place without judgement on oppression. The task of ecclesial theology in this situation is to dispel polarization by letting central truths be central, and lesser truths be lesser, but in each case letting truth be truth. No reason exists why the cross as atonement for sin should be viewed as logically incompatible with the cross as divine solidarity with the oppressed. Good reasons can be found for connecting them.11 The great historical ecumenical consensus remains, however, that the central significance of the cross, as attested by Holy Scripture, is (in one way or another) the forgiveness of sins. This established consensus in fact pervades every aspect of the church’s life, not least including baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It has by this time withstood the onslaughts of unbelieving modernity, so that the only question today is not whether the ecumenical consensus will survive, but whether those churches devitalized by modern scepticism will. No ecclesial theology can be valid which fails to affirm the forgiveness of sins as central to the meaning of the cross. ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ (Lk. 23.34). Lesser truths, however, which are certainly weightly in their own right, ought not to be pitted against central truths. Lesser truths, moreover, gain rather than diminish in significance when decentred, for they no longer have a role foisted upon them that they cannot fulfil. A properly ecclesial theology will attempt to do justice to both central and lesser truths as well as to their proper ordering. As I will try to show, the category of ‘the sinner’ needs to be distinguished carefully from that of ‘the victim’ in order to set forth their inner unity.12

For a book-length development of these ideas, see Nathan D. Hieb, Christ Crucified in a Suffering World: The Unity of Atonement and Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013). 12 These opening paragraphs are a lightly re-written excerpt from my essay ‘Social Witness in Generous Orthodoxy,’ in George Hunsinger, Conversational Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2015): 205–32. 11



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1. ‘The sinner’ is a universal category while ‘the victim’ is a limited or circumscribed category. Sin is seen as a universal category throughout Holy Scripture. Perhaps the Bible’s most sustained indictment against it is found in the opening chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. The apostle seals his harrowing argument by quoting from the Psalms: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one’ (Rom. 3.10-12; Ps. 14.1-3; Ps. 53.1-3).13 The conclusion: ‘For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3.22-23). Much the same emphasis appears in the Johannine literature. ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’ (1 Jn1.8). Jesus himself seems to suggest a universal propensity toward sin when he states: ‘If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children’ (Mt. 7.11). Long before him Jeremiah had lamented: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?’ (Jer. 17.9 RSV). The same thought appears in the first book of the Bible: ‘The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually’ (Gen. 6.5 RSV). Not even the most blameless person is excluded: ‘Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins’ (Eccl. 7.20). Luther never tired of reverting to the prophet Isaiah: ‘But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags’ (Isa. 64.6 KJV). By contrast, ‘the victim’ as a social category is clearly limited in scope. Not all persons are victims of social injustice.14 By definition, if there are social or political classes of victims, there are also victimizers over against them, regardless of whether they operate at a level that is more individual or more cultural and institutional. The poor, for example, are often victims of oppression and exploitation by the rich. The Ninth Commandment, which forbids false witness against one’s neighbour, indirectly forbids social prejudice against ‘people belonging to any vulnerable, different or disfavoured social group. Jews, women, homosexuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and national enemies are among those who have historically suffered from vicious attitudes of prejudice.’15 Lies go hand in hand with violence, and negative stereotyping accompanies All scripture passages are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted. In this essay I am thinking about victims of systematic, social injustice, not isolated cases, or more or less random acts of victimization. This approach is in line with victim-oriented soteriologies. 15 Question 115 in The Study Catechism: Full Version (Louisville, NY: Witherspoon Press, 1998), pp. 67–8. This is a document of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which I helped to write. 13 14

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victimization. Negative stereotyping underwrites crimes of humiliation and abuse as are indirectly forbidden by the commandment against murder. False witness is a sin that creates victims and generates violence. When the Old Testament prophets condemn violence against the poor, they are implicitly condemning every form of victimization and social injustice. The prophet Amos vents his moral outrage: Hear this, you who trample upon the needy,   and [bring to ruin] the poor of the land, saying, ‘When will the new moon be over,   that we may sell grain? And the sabbath,   that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great,   and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver   and the needy for a pair of sandals,   and sell the [debris as] wheat? (Amos 8.4-6)

To sum up, this analysis points to a complex situation. All victims are sinners, but not all sinners are victims. Indeed, some sinners, far from being victims, are beneficiaries of social injustice while others are (guilty) bystanders. As we will see, what the victim qua victim needs is justice while what the sinner qua sinner needs is a Saviour. The victim needs redress through works of the Law while the sinner, who is devoid of good works in any relevant sense, needs the Gospel.

2. Sinners, who undertake evil, are tainted by an unshakable guilt, while victims, who undergo evil, retain a basic innocence. Sinners are those who undertake evil, whereas victims of injustice are those who undergo evil at the hands of others. The difference between ‘sin’ and ‘victimization’ is the difference between wrongdoing and innocent suffering. There is a sense in which ‘victimization’ always involves innocence. All victims are sinners, but only insofar as they share in the universal human plight. The victim qua victim, however, is a victim, not a sinner. It is essential not to blame the victim for the plight of being a victim. Blaming the victim is a wellknown ploy of the oppressor. It is an all-too-familiar tactic, for example, in cases of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. Victims are constantly encouraged by the powerful to enlist in their own oppression by blaming themselves.



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The oppressor, exploiter or perpetrator, on the other hand, is always a sinner, but in two different forms, categorically and more specifically: categorically because of the universal plight, more specifically by wrongful deeds of oppression. The universal plight does not excuse the wrongful deeds. The oppressor needs to repent of his oppression as well as of his more categorical sinfulness. Perpetrators qua perpetrators, and victims qua victims: both need the deliverances of grace, though not necessarily in the same ways. Insofar as they are categorically sinners, however, they both need grace and repentance in exactly the same ways. In this sense sin is the great equalizer. Sin as a general condition and sin as oppression need to be kept distinct. Among the oppressed, and among those who identify with their cause, the failure to recognize sin as a universal category applying also to themselves tends toward the sin of superbia: pride, self-righteousness, self-justification. In superbia sin is externalized in the other. This is the deadly sin of progressives who champion social justice. ‘You who boast in the law, do you dishonour God by breaking the law?’ (Rom. 2.23 RSV). Among those not directly implicated in the victims’ misery, the failure to recognize victimization as a wrong that cries out for rectification tends toward the sin of acedia: apathy, sloth, indifference. In acedia injustice is seen as something unpleasant but not as a cause for great concern. This is the deadly sin of moderates who turn their heads, pretending not to see. ‘Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side’ (Lk. 10.31-32). Among those who are complicit in perpetrating social injustice, the failure to consider the needs of others as being comparable to their own tends toward the sin of avaritia: avarice, greed, rapacity, covetousness. In avaritia injustice is not so bad after all. This is the deadly sin of conservatives who rationalize the unacceptable. ‘What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war’ (Jas 4.1–2 RSV). As serious as the plight of the victim is, the sinner’s plight is more deep-seated and all-inclusive. Anselm’s question cannot be avoided: Have you considered ‘how great the weight of sin is’ (quanti ponderis sit peccatum)? Although the one plight is more weighty than the other, the plight of victims is disturbing enough and ought never to be minimized. Sin and victimization both need to be taken

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with full seriousness – in the right way, and at the right time. Neither is taken seriously when the one is downplayed at the expense of the other.

3. The plight of the sinner is fraught with mystery in a way that the plight of the victim is not. Discourse about human sinfulness is necessarily a broken discourse. Sin defies ordinary modes of comprehension. Almost everything about it is opaque. Its origins, its depths and its consequences are strange, sinister and frightening. Without a conscious effort, under the influence of grace, the temptation to domesticate sin can scarcely be resisted. Sin is domesticated whenever it is portrayed as being more intelligible and less severe than it is.

The mystery of sin’s depths Sin is at once a brute fact and a dark mystery. Its eerie presence in every aspect of human life is unnerving. Although it may not be surprising that sinners live in a state of denial about their plight, even their denial can be discomfiting. There is nothing more characteristic of sin than self-deception. In Romans 1.18-31 Paul sets forth sin as radical before he reveals it as universal. Sin is not only a matter of wrongdoing, but also of spiritual blindness and disordered desires. It is a condition manifest in every wrongful deed and prior to every sinful action. It affects the head, the heart, and the hand. No aspect of human nature is untainted by its power. It has disfigured human nature as a whole. The extent of this radical corruption is what the Reformers, following Augustine, meant by ‘total depravity’. They did not mean that the image of God (imago Dei) as created good was lost, but that sin as a spiritual disposition corrupts all human works even at their best. Referring to human beings after the Fall, Paul describes their unfortunate condition: they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened … They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless … [moreover] they not only do [deplorable things] but give approval to those who practise them. (Rom. 1.21, 29-32)



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A basic difference thus emerges between the sinner and the victim. Because sin is both radical and universal, it involves the corruption of the human heart. Yet while all human beings share in this corruption, no one is a victim by nature. Being a sinner is a fundamental condition whereas being a victim is an accidental property. Oppression does not corrupt the true essence of its victims. It would be more accurate to say that it corrupts the true essence of the oppressors. Oppressors have succumbed to sin in one of its most pernicious forms: what Augustine called the lust for domination (libido dominandi). As the lust for power, advantage and glory, oppression violates the inalienable dignity of its victims, who are created in the image of God. The imago Dei throws the mystery of sin into sharp relief. Created goodness stands in paradoxical tension with humanity’s universal dissolution. ‘The Christian estimate of human evil’, writes Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘is so serious precisely because it places evil at the very center of human personality: in the will … Man contradicts himself within the terms of his true essence. His sin is the wrong use of his freedom and its consequent destruction.’16 Created in a state of integrity, humanity languishes in corruption.

The mystery of sin’s origins Despite all attempts at explanation, the origins of sin remain obscure. Appeals to ‘free-will’, for example, are unsuccessful. They fail to grasp that free will is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for humanity’s fall into sin. Augustine was surely right when he argued that human beings were created in a state of grace sufficient to keep them from falling. Likewise, ascribing sin’s origins to a built-in anxiety about human ‘finitude’ fails for similar reasons. Inordinate anxiety is more cogently seen as a consequence of sin rather than its prior explanation. Once again, the argument proceeds as if original grace were insufficient. Every attempt to ‘explain’ how sin originated creates more problems than it solves. Descriptive analyses seem preferable to causal explanations. When Kierkegaard suggested that ‘sin posits itself ’, he was being more nearly descriptive than explanatory.17 To regard sin as self-positing is to treat it as an irreducible Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1941), p. 16. 17 Although it was Niebuhr who made this statement famous, Kierkegaard’s text does not quite seem to contain it. See Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, pp. 181, 252; but cf. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 67. Niebuhr was following an older German translation of Kierkegaard from the Danish. The idea is important regardless of its source. 16

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mystery, not as a problem to be solved. If Augustine was right that grace is irresistible, then sin – as both a universal fact and a radical human corruption – is ultimately something that defies all powers of explanation. From a theological standpoint, it is inexplicable. Barth therefore saw it as the ‘impossible possibility’. Sin exists only as something intrinsically absurd. These puzzles are compounded when we turn to the origins of the species as seen by evolutionary biology. Michael Horton may be correct when he writes: ‘Christian theology stands or falls with a historical Adam and a historical fall.’ Otherwise, he warns, ‘two serious problems ensue: first, sin must be attributed to creation itself (and therefore to the Creator); second, there is no longer any historical basis for Christ’s work.’18 Horton does not tell us, however, how to square a historical fall with evolutionary biology. Kelsey, Barth and Schleiermacher find this problem so intractable that they reject the Fall’s historicity, but this only leaves them impaled on Horton’s dilemma. Alvin Plantinga, who argues that evolutionary biology is not necessarily incompatible with an original human couple, posits that God breathed their souls into them. They then fell inexplicably but culpably from original integrity into sin’s distress. Whatever the plausibilities of this scenario, it would satisfy Horton’s worries.19 A historical fall might make sense of sin’s radicality, but there would still be the problem of its universality. The affirmation that sin is universal belongs to the traditional doctrine of ‘original sin.’ Again, we find both descriptive and explanatory elements. No ‘explanation’ of how original sin came to be universally transmitted, however, seems to be satisfactory. Two of the main ones are the Augustinian idea of sexual transmission and the Calvinist idea of divine imputation. Neither account makes it clear how all others can be held responsible for Adam’s sin. Rather than look for causal explanations, it seems better to think of sin’s universality in terms of an inscrutable participation. The fall into sin by the first human couple did not ‘cause’ sin in the rest of the human race. The mystery of universal sinfulness is related to Adam’s sin not by causation but by spiritual participation. We sin ‘in Adam’ not because of Adam. ‘Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all because Michael Horton, The Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), pp. 424–5. I am lifting out the merely descriptive element. Plantinga is heavily into apologetics and theoretical explanations based on his (perhaps not always plausible) sense of ‘probabilities’. See Alvin Plantinga, ‘Historical Adam: One Possible Scenario’ (02/14/13). Available online: http://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/historical-adam-one-possible-scenario

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all have sinned’ (Rom. 5.12). ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Cor. 15.22). ‘In Adam’s fall sinned we all’ (Puritan proverb). ‘In each the sin of all, in all the sin of each’ (Schleiermacher). We find ourselves in a fallen condition that we readily make our own, at both the individual and the social levels. It is as if each one of us would have wilfully rebelled against God to disastrous effect regardless of who occupied in the original position. The breadth and depth of human sinfulness can finally be known only by revelation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church seems exactly right: ‘The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.’20 Here a historical fall is affirmed but no explanation is given of its transmission. The universal mystery of sin and its terrors are revealed to faith through the Word of God.

The mystery of sin’s consequences Sin is not only radical and universal. It is also a power that holds us in bondage. ‘Whoever commits a sin is a slave of sin’ (Jn 8.34 NKJV). For the first human beings, before the Fall, it was possible not to sin (posse non peccare). After the Fall, it was not possible not to sin (non posse non peccare). Apart from grace we are enslaved to sin as a dominating power that rules over us (Rom. 6. 6, 12). ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Rom. 7.19).21 Guilt and power are not two separate parts of sin, but two ways of seeing it as a whole. Though the guilt is prior to the enslaving power, bondage follows inexorably from the guilt. The sin which holds us in bondage is humanly irreversible. We can neither undo our guilty past nor remedy our deep-seated corruption. Apart from grace, we have no hope of deliverance. We are incapable of the good required for our salvation. The plight of the victim is therefore distinct from the mystery of sin. Victimization is neither universal nor radical nor irreversible in the specific ways that sin is. Although sin and victimization are contrary to the will of God, Catechism of the Catholic Church, #390 (New York: Doubleday, 1997, 2nd edn), p. 110, italics original. 21 From Augustine through Aquinas to Luther, Calvin and Barth, Rom. 7.14-25 has been seen as pertaining to the Christian life. The decisive arguments for this view are (a) that the passage is written in the present tense and (b) that the experience it describes would not be possible apart from faith. Therefore it does not seem to describe the believer’s pre-Christian consciousness or experience. 20

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they are so in different ways: God condemns sin while extending compassion to the victims. Condemnation and compassion are both grounded in God’s perfect righteousness. Just because God is perfectly good by nature, he cannot possibly condone sin, but for the same reason he takes victims of injustice to heart.

4. Sin is a theological category whereas victimization is a sociopolitical (and psychological) category. We now come to the heart of the matter. A difference in kind is mainly what distinguishes the sinner from the victim. All sin is against God, and some sin is exclusively against God. ‘Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgement’ (Ps. 51.4). ‘They did not honour [God] as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened’ (Rom. 1.21). Sin, it should be emphasized, is not primarily a moral category, but a theological and spiritual category. It pertains first of all to our relationship with God (the vertical dimension), and only in consequence to our relationships with one another (the horizontal dimension). Sin (vertically) is the great spiritual disorder (the tap root), from which all our social and moral disorders arise (lateral roots). Sin in its vertical or Godward vector manifests itself in the following: unbelief, spiritual blindness, idolatry (i.e. worshipping something as God which is not God, especially worshipping that which makes for death); religious indifference; rebellion against God’s will; disordered desires – loving the wrong things, loving the right things wrongly, not loving God above all else, loving ourselves at the expense of God and our neighbours (self-seeking); not trusting God to meet all our needs (Phil. 4.19) while denying God’s grace as sufficient for us (2 Cor. 12.9); a sense of entitlement and resentment toward God as opposed to a proper fear and gratitude; manipulating God through religion (not least in politics); turning from God through anxiety and despair; treating God merely as an instrumental value (as a means to our ends) rather than as the Highest Good (summum bonum) by whom all other goods are contained, relativized and judged. Sin is not primarily estrangement. It is primarily a matter of enmity toward God. ‘While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son’ (Rom. 5.10). Sin is rooted in a willful disorder at the core of our being. To be a sinner is to be an enemy of grace. The preposition that goes with sin is against. ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to



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be called your son’ (Lk. 15.21). Only because we sin against God are we also estranged from God. The paradox is that though sin is something we voluntarily commit, we cannot free ourselves from it by our own devices. As already suggested, the sin that holds us in its grip is beyond our powers of deliverance. Although sin is sometimes defined as ‘missing the mark,’ this idea, though not entirely wrong, remains at a superficial level. It overlooks the weightier matter of sin as rebellion against God and estrangement from him. Sin is not like a failure in archery. It is a deep-seated corruption of the heart, the hand and the mind. Social injustice, on the other hand, is an outrageous form of moral evil. It operates at the horizontal rather than the vertical level. As a shameful violation of human beings, it is also a sin against God, but only indirectly. The vertical and the horizontal, the social and the theological, the primary and the secondary, are related by a subtle pattern of unity-in-distinction. All sins against human beings are also sins against God, but some sins against God are not necessarily sins against human beings. If reductionism and confusion are to be avoided, these aspects need to be kept distinct. The unity of sin in its vertical and horizontal dimensions was noted by Calvin: ‘Nor is it strange’, he wrote, ‘that [Micah the prophet] begins with the duties of love of neighbor. For although the worship of God has precedence and ought rightly to come first, yet justice which is practised in human relations is the true evidence of devotion to God.’22 Here the practice of justice is inseparable from devotion to God. Devotion to God, however, is not exhausted by the practice of justice. Given our disrelation to God as the backstory, social and moral consequences can be allowed to take the spotlight. Warring madness might serve as an example: ‘Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity … The way of peace they know not, and there is no justice in their paths; they have made their roads crooked, no one who goes in them knows peace’ (Rom. 3.15-17; Isa. 59.7-9 RSV). This passage is immediately followed by another: ‘There is no fear of God before their eyes’ (Rom. 3.18; Ps. 36.1). This denunciation would apply to warmongering politicians, no matter how pious. Hitler kept Daily Bible Readings at his bedside. Under the title ‘The Roots of Violence,’ Gandhi constructed a list of evils: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Comm. on Micah 6:8.

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Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles.23

What Gandhi anchors in moral defect could be extended more basically to our fatal disrelationship with God (as Gandhi might in his own way have agreed).

5. The remedy for the sinner lies in the gospel whereas the remedy for the victim requires works of the law. Sin needs a salvation beyond human powers to effect. Victimization, on the other hand, demands remedies that can be humanly achieved. Only God can save us from our sins, but victims and their allies can unite to rectify social wrongs. This is a far-reaching difference between the sinner and the victim. The remedies stand in inverse proportion, so to speak, to the maladies. Whereas the malady of sin is active, its remedy is a gift to be received. For victims of injustice, on the other hand, the situation is much the reverse. The malady is inflicted, but the remedy depends on concerted social action. The New Testament populates its stories with people who are incapacitated. The blind, the deaf, the lame, the possessed, and most remarkably the dead, have no power to deliver themselves from their afflictions. Their hope depends entirely on a quality of mercy that visits them from without.24 All these sorry figures can be interpreted symbolically as representing the incapacitations of sin.25 Sin as a power is debilitating. It renders sinners helpless to rescue themselves. For Paul, the grace of Christ, as grounded in his saving death, comes precisely to those who are lost. It comes to sinners who are helpless, ungodly, and at enmity with God. It does not give them what they deserve, but precisely what they do not deserve. It delivers them despite an inexcusable guilt. For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly … But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us … For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God See Frank Woolever, Gandhi’s List of Social Sins: Lessons in Truth (Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing, 2011). The list was first published in Gandhi’s weekly newspaper Young India (22 October 1925). 24 In the stories they must, of course, be moved to accept this mercy by faith. 25 This point, it should be mentioned, pertains to the remedy not the malady. Unlike sinners qua sinners, the needy figures in the New Testament stories are not responsible for their plights (cf. Jn 9.2-3). The remedies, however, are analogous, because only a miraculous power of deliverance suffices in each case. 23



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through the death of his Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. (Rom. 5.6, 8, 10 NASB)

Grace thus serves to deliver the undeserving and capacitate the incapacitated. The saving work of Christ is something that encounters us by grace here and now. It is a gift to be received not by works of the law, but by grace through faith. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked … But God, being rich in mercy … loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses … For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works. (Eph. 1.1-2, 4-5, 8-9)

For Paul, salvation from sin – from its guilt and power – is a free gift that is extended apart from works of the law (Rom. 3.20, 28). Salvation from sin is something grounded in the Cross and made available to faith through the Gospel. The deliverance of victims from injustice, on the other hand, is not essentially a gift but a task, and an arduous one at that. Whereas the deliverance of the sinner moves, as it were, from the active to the passive (from complicity to receptivity), the deliverance of the victim moves from the passive to the active (from affliction to resistance). Sinners cannot save themselves through works of the law, but works of the law, as works of love and justice, are exactly what victims of injustice need. For victims to be delivered from their sorry condition, their works, in concert with others, are indispensable. The merciful God who delivers from sin is the same God who denounces injustice and identifies in solidarity with the oppressed. This God hears the cries of those who suffer wrong. The Lord is a God of justice, who knows no favourites. Though not unduly partial toward the weak, yet he hears the cry of the oppressed … The Lord is not deaf to the wail of the orphan, nor to the widow when she pours out her complaint … The prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds; it does not rest till it reaches its goal, nor will it withdraw till the Most High responds, judges justly and affirms the right, and the Lord will not delay. (Sir. 35.12-14, 17-18)

The theme of compassion toward the lowly runs throughout the Old Testament. ‘The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed’ (Ps. 103.6). ‘The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble’ (Ps. 9.9). ‘When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a saviour and defender, and deliver them’ (Isa 19.20). ‘He will have compassion on the poor and needy, And the lives of the needy he will save’ (Ps. 72.13).

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Echoes of these themes are found in the New Testament as well. In the Magnificat, the advent of Christ forebodes a great reversal. ‘He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree’ (Lk. 1.52 RSV). At the outset of his ministry, Jesus identifies himself with the messianic words of Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed’ (Lk. 4.18; Isa. 61.1). Jesus, in his person, embodies God’s solidarity with the oppressed. ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ (Mt. 25.35-40).

The impediments to social justice today are far more structural than personal. Vast amounts of wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of the few. It is astonishing that many believers who uphold a traditional view of sin as something universal, radical and corrupting cannot bring themselves to apply this doctrine to social structures. Nevertheless, as recognized by Oscar Romero, ‘When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises’.26 A doctrine of sin without structural analysis is not enough. Because the problem of injustice is structural, resistance to it must be structural as well. As political theorist Gene Sharp has argued, structural injustice can be overcome through the practice of nonviolence. ‘Nonviolent struggle’, he writes, ‘is the most powerful means available to those struggling for freedom.’27 According to his analysis, nonviolent resistance involves three main elements: (i) protest and persuasion, (ii) noncooperation, and (iii) nonviolent intervention. Above all, it involves disciplined and organized mobilization. Sharp writes: Quoted in Ted Fortier, Jeanette Rodriguez, ‘Oscar Romero: Still Presente!’ Sojourners magazine, March 2010. Available online: https://sojo.net/magazine/march-2010/oscarromero-still-presente#sthash.rBChfOMb.dpuf 27 Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2012), p. 22. For many historical examples see Peter Ackerman and Jack Du Vall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 26



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Very importantly, in order to have maximum impact, this noncooperation and disobedience must take the form of mass action. While individual acts may at times be scarcely noticed, the defiance of organizations and institutions – churches, trade unions, business organizations, the bureaucracy, neighborhoods, villages, cities, regions, and the like – may be pivotal.28

As Sharp recognizes, churches can play an important role in the success of nonviolent social movements. From a theological standpoint, sinners who know they have been delivered by grace have a responsibility to act in accord with they grace they have received. They have a responsibility to take the needs of others as seriously as God in Christ has taken their own. Faith in the Gospel is inseparable from works of the Law. Social responsibility is required of the faithful who know they have been delivered from sin by grace. Obedience to God is inseparable from resistance to structural injustice. Gratitude for grace means solidarity with the poor and the oppressed.

6. Sin fosters illusion whereas victimization furthers insight. We arrive at another difference between the sinner and the victim. Sinners justify their sins to themselves (and others) whereas victims do not justify their victimization, unless they have been indoctrinated. Sinners are lost in illusions whereas victims can attain a degree of insight. Sin is not merely a matter of wrongdoing, nor is it seated exclusively in the desires of the heart. It is also a matter of blindness. Sinners are blind not only to their own sinfulness but also to the needs of others. Self-justification and social indifference are among the intolerable results. Victims, on the other hand, have built-in incentives to understand their plight. The oppressed can tend to know the oppressors better than the oppressors know themselves. This point has been made incisively by Jean Baker Miller. Subordinates … know much more about the dominants than vice versa. They have to. They become highly attuned to the dominants, able to predict their reactions of pleasure and displeasure … [M]embers of the subordinate group have certain experiences and perceptions that accurately reflect the truth about themselves and the injustice of their position … To the extent that subordinates move toward freer

Sharp, How Nonviolent Struggle Works (Boston: Albert Einstein Institute, 2013), pp. 15–16. Availableonline: http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/How-Nonviolent-StruggleWorks.pdf

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expression and action, they will expose the inequality and throw into question the basis of its existence. And they will make the inherent conflict an open conflict.29

The antidote to spiritual blindness for sinners rests outside themselves in revelation and grace whereas the antidote to false-consciousness for subordinates is latent in the dynamics of the situation itself.

7. The sinner’s peril and hope are eternal whereas those of the victim are temporal. Because all sin is essentially against God, its peril and hope have to do with eternal life. Victimization, by contrast, is more nearly social and political, so its peril and hope are correspondingly this-worldly. The difference between the sinner and the victim emerges sharply at this point. The sinner’s peril points to divine judgement and eternal loss. It is because sin represents a shattered relationship with God that ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Rom. 6.23) – and this is necessarily so. The death dealt by sin is spiritual and eternal, because it means estrangement from God as the Fountain of life. To be cut off from God can only mean endless misery. The peril of sin is greater than anything that can be conceived. The phrase ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ appears seven times in the New Testament to describe the destiny of impenitence. The victim’s peril, on the other hand, is often a very present suffering in time of trouble. It finds little relief in human history. God’s solidarity with the oppressed does not prevent them from dying in untold numbers while seeing little justice in their lives. The temporal hopes of the victims, despite occasional and hard-won progress, are disappointed more often than not. Even the most inspiring social victories – intrinsically good and well worth attaining – leave deeper questions in their train. Given the disappointment of temporal hopes, is there a hope beyond history for the countless victims of social injustice? Indeed, is there a hope for the pious who have a remarkable capacity for ignoring their plight? Do not those, and especially believers, who neglect the needs of the poor make themselves a liable to judgement? ‘Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed … For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink”’ (Mt. 25.41-42). Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 2nd edn), pp. 10, 11, 12. Miller also concentrates on social dynamics that inhibit consciousness-raising among subordinates.

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If there is a hope for history’s mangled victims, not to mention for socially reprehensible believers, and even for the impenitent to find final repentance, then grace must have the last word. The promise of the Gospel is that all our miseries are no match for the triumph of Christ. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away … And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold … God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away’ (Rev. 21.1, 3-4)

In the resurrection of the Crucified Saviour, the hope of the sinner and of the victim are one. ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Rev. 21.5).

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The following dogmatic thought experiment regards the relationship of Jesus Christ to human sin. It traces the exegetical reasoning of the Epistle to the Hebrews, chs 2–4, regarding the person of Christ. It eventuates in an approach to modern conversations regarding the human nature of Christ – whether fallen or unfallen – but it does so by situating it amidst a wider biblical and Christological context and with engagement of a perhaps surprising doctrinal resource: the Westminster Standards, that is, the confessional documents produced by the Westminster Assembly (the Westminster Confession of Faith as well as the Larger and Shorter Catechisms). The argument moves in four steps followed by a fifth section that offers some summative remarks.

I For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. (Heb. 2.10)

Sin is a terribly strange and odd thing. Inasmuch as the gospel involves a story of perfection, we ought to step back and consider the doctrinal matrix within which any discussion of sin would occur. Sin is unnatural. The Christian tradition has stridently opposed any dualism in which sin or evil is eternal or equivalent to the goodness, truth and beauty of the triune God. While theologians have disagreed upon the best ways to avoid this dualism, they have consistently insisted upon the necessity of doing so. We cannot allow familiarity or overexposure to lead us away from the appropriate response of shock at the very mention of sin: it is treachery, deceit, unfaithfulness, a tear in the

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very fabric of our fellowship one with the other (most of all, a fissure in our concord with God). That a word about God would speak also of sin is an odd and unexpected thing, inasmuch as God is righteous, truthful, faithful and, above all, holy. Another way to begin is to say that glory is fundamental in the gospel. God is glorious. This one is confessed to be unapproachable and indescribable precisely due to his luminosity and his excess of resplendence. This is the one attested magnificent: King of kings and Lord of lords. This is the one whose fullness and life has been his own from eternity past: Father, Son and Spirit enjoying the rich harmony of the ever-sufficient triune love. And this bejewelled King determines to share that majesty with others, glorifying his creature with the light that is his alone. This ever-glorious God is now declared by the author of Hebrews to be ‘bringing many sons to glory’ (Heb. 2.10). Surely the language of sonship – specifically in the male register – is intentional, drawing as it would on the ancient rites of inheritance, wherein the firstborn male receives the glory, laud and honour that were the patriarch’s alone. But here ‘many sons’ participate in this glory of the Father; it is not only shared with another, but is shared with many children, given to daughters as well as sons. God’s children are brought to glory ‘through suffering’ (Heb. 2.10). This is not an obvious connection, and indeed, it is a startling characterization. In its preceding context, of course, the glories of the gospel have been described in heavenly and in angelic terms, and then ‘by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will’ (Heb. 2.4). But ‘it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come’ (Heb. 2.5); rather, glory turns creaturely and human, as the anonymous author addresses its shape. Taking up the words of Psalm 8, he said: ‘You made him [man] for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honour, putting everything in subjection under his feet’ (Heb. 2.7-8; citing Ps. 8.5-6). When the proclamation turns to Christ specifically, again it addresses his being ‘crowned with glory and honour’, but this majesty is ‘because of the suffering of death’ (Heb. 2.9). The pathway to glory is a portrait of pain and discipline. The text presents the beginning as the imprint of the end. ‘He, for whom and by whom all things exist’ brought this salvation to pass through his Son (Heb. 2.10). Alpha and Omega are united in their sovereign sway over ‘all things’ in heaven above and earth below. The Creator – the language ‘by whom’ surely emphasizes that he was not only the planner (‘for whom’) of all things but their very maker himself – holds the place of privilege and honour when it comes

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to refashioning. The author quotes the Psalmist to attest to this subjection of creation to its Maker: ‘You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands’ (Heb. 1.10; citing Ps. 102.25). Perfection and sin. Glory possessed and glory shared. Glory known only through suffering. Creation and conclusion. Beginning and end. Each of these pairs attests the narrative fit of the gospel story. In each case, possible dichotomies and oppositions are repaired by tracing the exegetical shape of the gospel’s form. Hebrews uses the language of fittingness to speak of this sense. ‘For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering’ (Heb. 2.10). The claim that this movement is ‘fitting’ (eprepen) does not attest to common sense or worldly wisdom; it registers the appropriate relationship of one feature with the wider shape of the gospel as revealed in the canon of prophetic, apostolic Scripture. Thomas Aquinas is the master of arguments from fittingness (ex convenientia). ‘Fittingness’ is not a doctrine itself, but it is a tool for thinking doctrines. ‘Fittingness’ links the gospel of Jesus with the wider canonical portrait of God’s self-revelation and his revelation of created being.30 Whether discussing the virgin birth, Christ’s death upon the cross, or the transfiguration, Thomas teases out the scriptural logic of fittingness, showing how the manifestation of the gospel matches its theological order in the history of redemption. Fittingness is not reference to mere foretelling or prophecy; it is a claim about narrative fit. Aristotle’s notion of ‘dramatic coherence’ pertains here, where events happen ‘unexpectedly but on account of each other’, so that ‘before each decisive event we cannot predict it, but afterwards see it was just what had to happen’.31 The canonical logic of the gospel is neither the wisdom of the Greeks nor the miraculous expectation of the Jews (1 Cor. 1.22). There is a fit to the gospel, however, so long as one views it within the wider matrix of Christian doctrine and, more fundamentally, the breadth of that to which doctrine points: the ‘whole counsel of God’ revealed in the writings of the prophets and the apostles. As we reflect further upon the relationship of Jesus Christ to the absurd reality of human sin, we do well to move incrementally from the widest possible orbit to increasingly more confined relations and to trace the unfolding argument of See Frederick C. Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 161ff., 171, 197–201. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume One: The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 64. Cf. Aristotle, Peri Poietikes, 1452a, 3.

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this apostolic epistle as well. In so doing, we may avoid too easily identifying sin or its solution with matters close to our cultural or personal hand; and in so doing, our theological grammar can be disciplined by the arch of Scripture’s own theological presentation. We inquire whether specific Christological claims make sense or fit with the wider canonical teaching on the nature of God and of humanity, of sin and its redemption, and so forth. With that methodological concern in mind, then, we will turn to consider the incarnational union, the humanity of Christ, and the relationship of him to human sin.

II Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. (Heb. 2.14)

Hebrews 2 presses further to articulate a grammar for discussing the person of Christ. It does so with sin in mind, that is, as an antidote and answer to the mangling effects of death. Hebrews 2.14 unfolds this sphere of death by referring to ‘the one who has the power death, that is, the devil’ as well as those with ‘fear of death’ and thus ‘subject to lifelong slavery’. Physical death alone does not encompass the sway of this struggle; rather, it reaches out to take in ‘the power of death’ and even ‘lifelong slavery’ and subjection. The idioms of politics (‘power’), the courtroom (‘devil’ or ‘the accuser’), psychological malformation (‘fear’), and sociological struggle (‘slavery’ and subjection) are all engaged to describe this multifaceted funk that is sin as well as its consequent death-dealing excess. In this valley of sin and death the light shines upon the person of Christ. This one ‘partook of the same things’, that is, the very ‘flesh and blood’ of ‘the children’. The relationship of Hebrews to Platonism continues to be debated in various ways; surely the author here intends to point to the pitiful reality of material flesh as now a part of the very person of Christ.32 The text employs the language of sameness (‘the same things’) to convey that the flesh and blood or humanity of the Son is the same humanity identified with the rest of the children of the living God. The same flesh capable of being sawn in two (Heb. For orientation to the issues regarding Hebrews and its relationship to varying Platonisms, see Luke Timothy Johnson, Hebrews: A Commentary (New Testament Library, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), pp. 17–21.

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11.37), disciplined (Heb. 12.5-13), and resurrected (Heb. 13.20) is partaken of by the second person of the Trinity. Any use of Platonic idiom to express the timely logic of the gospel in Hebrews is chastened by the humane character of the Son’s existence as an embodied, temporal, and social being. This assumption of humanity is not held at remove or at any distance. ‘He himself likewise partook’ of this creaturely experience. Here is no maneuver towards an emanationist or angelic/mediatorial Christology; indeed, Hebrews 1.4-14 has excluded any such approach. This one is ‘very God’ or ‘fully God’, the repetition of the subject’s identification (‘he himself ’) attests to the specificity of the claim. This humanity is the Word or the Son’s personal humanity. The classical dogmatic tradition has maintained this single subject Christology through the centuries; for example, the Westminster Confession of Faith attests to the reality of Christ in these words: The Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties, and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin; being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance. So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. Which person is very God, and very man, one Christ, the only Mediator between God and man.33

Westminster reiterates Chalcedonian language – ‘without conversion, composition, or confusion’ – in a Cyrillian fashion that fixes upon the single subject: ‘The Son of God, the second person of the Trinity … Which person … one Christ, the only Mediator.’ Here God and humanity are not brought close or near; they are personally united in this one, the second person of the Trinity. They are not mingled into a third kind (tertium quid) but are existent in a personal union of a single subject. As Bonaventure said: ‘even though the divine and human natures are distant from each other as the infinite is from the finite, yet they can be united in a hypostatic union in a way that preserves the properties of each nature. But divine nature itself never becomes finite, nor the human nature infinite.’34 The Son of God really partook of our experience as one who was genuinely both divine and human. ‘Westminster Confession of Faith’, in John H. Leith (ed.), Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, 3rd edn (Louisville: John Knox, 1982), pp. 203–4 (VIII.2). 34 Bonaventure, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ (George Marcil [ed.], Zachary Hayes 33

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III Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. (Heb. 2.17)

Hebrews speaks of this fellow brother not only in terms of assumption but also in the language of growth and development (see later Heb. 5.7-8). Here the term ‘made’ is indicative of this broader concern: it speaks not simply to his beginning, but to his whole narrative arch and personal maturation. In these dynamic terms he is ‘made like his brothers’ – the language is also passive (‘he had to be made … so that he might become’). While this does not preclude his personal agency, a deeper theological point is highlighted here. His history has a depth deeper than his immediate volitional rule, a history that is embedded within that of his family. In this history, he has been ‘made like his brothers in every respect’. The Apollinarian controversy is no doubt the most apposite moment wherein this claim was explored for its implications. There the incarnational logic of the apostolic kerygma was taken to imply that the Son assumed not only flesh and blood, but everything respecting human life and nature. In that historical moment, of course, human rationality or mind was the controverted topic. Based on varying theories of the human and their composition throughout the centuries, however, the focus of this logic might shift. Later an ecumenical council would need to address the notion of the human will (therein opposing monothelitism), and then medieval theologians would wrestle with the passions more broadly (which involve intellectual life but are not bounded by it).35 In modern times, though, it was not compositional issues so much as psychological experience that became the focus of attention. Did the Son experience history as we do? This sort of question exercised the reformers, notably Calvin and the Reformed tradition. Later questions of personal growth and development went to the fore, inasmuch as anthropological investigations – whether

[trans.], Works of Saint Bonaventure IV [St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1992], p. 170 [Q. VI]). Bonaventure’s claim is one of many examples of the catholic heritage underlying the famed extra Calvinisticum; for reflection on this line of Christological reasoning from the patristic era all the way into the work of Calvin and other reformers, see E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 2; Leiden: Brill, 1967), especially pp. 26–60. 35 On the character of these conversations regarding the passions, see Kevin Madigan, The Passions of Christ in High-Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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in sociological or psychological approach – enabled scholars to assess the contours of human nature in its continually dynamic flux. ‘That he might become a merciful and faithful high priest’ (Heb. 2.17). The point of this personal assumption of a human nature in all its dynamic entanglements is for the sake of service, specifically, that he might be active ‘in the service of God’. The Westminster Larger Catechism draws out these emphases in its reflection on the Son’s human mediation: Q. 39: Why was it requisite that the Mediator should be man? A. It was requisite that the Mediator should be man, that he might advance our nature, perform obedience to the law, suffer and make intercession for us in our nature, have a fellow feeling of our infirmities; that we might receive the adoption of sons, and have comfort and access with boldness unto the throne of grace.36

His humanity was for the sake of ‘advance[ing] our nature’, that is, seeing the human through the full sweep of development and into the very presence of God. A priest serves to broker presence between two parties, making their intimacy possible by way of an ongoing ministry of intermediary activity (so Heb. 5.1). Hebrews insists on the ongoing nature of the Son’s mediation and priesthood; indeed, Hebrews 7.16 points to the reality of his intercession during his resurrected state (when he possesses that ‘indestructible life’).37 His ministry not only continues beyond that of any other human mediator, but it presses closer in to the divine life. As Cyril of Alexandria put it: ‘The mediation of Moses, however, is ministerial, while the mediation of Christ is free and more mystical since he touches the parties that are being mediated and reaches both, I mean the mediated human nature and God the Father.’38 His priesthood is merciful in that it reaches down to finite and fallen humans; yet it is also faithful inasmuch as it does not involve any infringement upon or diminution of the divine presence and its concomitant standards for purity and holiness. Genuine personal presence is made real, for all personal demands are met in this high priest.

‘Westminster Larger Catechism 39’, in The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part I: Book of Confessions (Louisville: Geneva, 1996), p. 254. On the resurrected character of Christ’s priesthood here, see David M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Supplements to Novum Testamentum 141; Leiden: Brill, 2011), although Moffitt unduly limits his priesthood office and service to the period of his heavenly session. 38 Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, vol. 1, Joel C. Elowsky (ed.), David R. Maxwell (trans.) (Ancient Christian Texts; Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), p. 175 (5:46). 36

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Most pointedly, he became this human priest and this perfect human ‘to make propitiation for the sins of the people’ (Heb. 2.17). He suffers the death of the cursed and only then receives back indestructible life. His narrative arch follows the course of his brethren: he does not merely enjoy life abundant, but he sacrifices his own innocent life prior to receiving it back – glorified – again. Thus his life truly is ‘for the sins of the people’ inasmuch as it is offered up for their sakes and now devoted to their cause by its intermediary function in the heavenly throne room. In all these respects he must be what we are – ‘that which is not assumed is not healed’, as the Cappadocians would put it – for there to be hope of peace and life as one of us. Hebrews is insistent, of course, that ‘it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’ (Heb. 10.4). In that context Christ takes the words of Psalm 40.6–8 upon his own lips, contrasting his personal offering of himself with ‘sacrifices and offerings,’ more specifically, with ‘burnt offerings and sin offerings’ in which ‘you [God] have taken no pleasure’ (Heb. 10.5, 6). ‘A body’ is necessary for taking away sins – a mere sacrifice in the manner of old is not enough. But this body must be ‘prepared’ for the high priest, suggesting that it must be made befitting this kind of propitiatory role. ‘And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all’ (Heb. 10.10).

IV We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. (Heb. 4.15)

Only now are we in a position to approach the question of Christ’s own personal relationship to sin. In the last two centuries, a debate has arisen regarding the precise nature of the humanity assumed by this Son: was it fallen or unfallen?39 Again we do well to pay attention to Hebrews and the dogmatic tradition and only then to consider recent polemics in light of that deep and broad context of Christological thought. I will suggest in so doing that careful attention to all that Hebrews and the dogmatic tradition are saying perhaps prepares us to For notable accounts, see arguments for a fallen human nature in Ian McFarland, ‘The Status of Christ’s Will: Fallen or Unfallen?’ in In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 117–40; Thomas Weinandy, In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ (London: T&T Clark, 1993). For an argument for an unfallen human nature, see Oliver D. Crisp, ‘Did Christ Have a Fallen Human Nature?’ in Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Current Issues in Theology; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 90–117.

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appreciate the link between Christ and the humanity which he redeems without conflating his moral character and that of the sinners for whom he has come to deliver salvation. To that end, we should reflect upon his human finitude and weakness, his experience of temptation, his consistent sinlessness, and the soteriological implications of these three Christological claims. First, sympathizing with weaknesses marks out the priestly exercise of this Son. He is able to offer sympathy. His weakness is not unique or different – it is ours. Jesus’ weakness is typified in that he was compelled to lead a life of prayer: ‘In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence’ (Heb. 5.7). His entreaties to his God and Father are not only prayerful but supplicatory, invoking God’s aid and help in time of crisis. They were blood-soaked, ‘with loud cries and tears’ in the very face of death. Second, in every respect he was tempted as we are. His weakness involved not only bodily constitution but also moral exposure. His journey through temptation constituted his path to maturity: ‘Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered’ (Heb. 5.8). His suffering was global: torture and death, false witness and blasphemy, rejection and isolation. In this sphere and amidst these challenges, ‘he learned obedience’ as a son. Indeed, Hebrews will later describe how this gauntlet exemplifies the matrix of maturation (Heb. 12.5-13), extending from the life of Christ (Heb. 12.1-3) to its wider application in the lives of his followers.40 Jesus was ‘author and perfector of faith’ (Heb. 12.2), bringing human faithfulness to its apex by journeying trustingly through death itself. Third, he was ‘yet without sin’ – theologians on all sides of this debate have insisted that this and other scriptural judgements regarding the moral purity of Jesus must be affirmed, namely, that he never sinned himself against God. Indeed, his sinless maturity enables his salvific ministry: ‘And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek’ (Heb. 5.10). This Son was not only reverent (Heb. 5.7) but was ‘made perfect’ through the long course of his faithful suffering. Indeed, ‘he has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people’ (Heb. 7.27). This one never has possessed an unholy character or acted in an impure way. On ‘autobiographical Christology’ wherein the mysteries of Christ are viewed as constitutive of the path of his people, see Andrew Hofer, Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus (Oxford Early Christian Studies; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially pp. 91–193.

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Fourth, what of the soteriological importance of these claims? The Westminster Confession can serve again as a prompt: ‘The Lord Jesus, in his human nature thus united to the divine, was sanctified, and anointed with the Holy Spirit, above measure, having in him all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; in whom it pleased the Father that all fullness should dwell.’ And all this was ‘to the end that, being holy, harmless, undefiled, and full of grace and truth, he might be thoroughly furnished to execute the office of a mediator, and surety’.41 This mediator is capable to serve as a priest and does actually mediate the very presence of God by entering now as a human, sanctified and even glorified to be a priest in the holy of holies. He is both mediator and surety, one who descends into our hell and also who goes into the very holy of holies as our pledge. This so-called double grace (duplex gratia) is not merely the confession of Westminster or of John Calvin, but of the early church fathers. Cyril notes how this mediator is ‘both the altar of incense since he is the pleasing aroma of sanctification and the altar of burnt offering since he is the sacrifice for the life of the world’.42 Considering this question only within the matrix of Christological teaching articulated in Hebrews and confessed at Nicaea and Chalcedon frees us from some overly hasty yet theologically detrimental manoeuvres that have plagued the modern conversation. We do well to note what has driven this conversation. On the one hand, any denial that Christ assumed a fallen human nature seems to fall prey to a series of questions: from where did Christ receive an unfallen human nature? What people will such a Christ save and take into the very presence of God: fallen or unfallen? Can such a Christ be confessed as a sympathetic high priest familiar with our sorrows and temptations? Indeed, failure to make such a confession that he assumed our nature – received from a sinner named Mary – seems to fall prey to the Cappadocian maxim: ‘that which is not assumed is not healed.’43 This would seem to be Christologically and soteriologically fatal. On the other hand, any approach to confess that Christ assumed a fallen human nature can easily tilt into a Spirit Christology that seems to fail to honour the specific divinity of the Son himself. Schleiermacher is surely the paradigm for such an approach, wherein the divinity of the Son is constituted ‘Westminster Confession of Faith’, in Creeds of the Churches, p. 204 (VIII.3). Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, p. 256 (6.68). 43 Gregory of Nazianzen, To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinarius (in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow (trans.), vol. 7 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publications, 1894, repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), p. 440. 41 42

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by his pneumatically shaped God-consciousness.44 Again, fatality seems the inevitable result, both in emptying one’s Christology of the claims ‘God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God’ and in ridding one’s soteriology of any real identification of God with humanity in personal terms. Such have been the recent assessments of the two sides of the debate. We do well to think beyond these false approaches. The virgin birth by the Spirit’s power is crucial: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you,’ Mary is told, ‘and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy – the Son of God’ (Lk. 1.35). From conception this son is ‘holy’ – a term that marks him out not only metaphysically as unique and singular but also morally as pure and righteous. Spirit Christology need not and ought not tilt into a denial of the divinity of the Son. The life-giving filling of the Spirit may supplement and not supplant the divinity of the Son provided that one identifies the Spirit’s strengthening as terminating upon the human nature and, more specifically, the human will of the second person of the Trinity.45 The scholastic distinction between the anhypostatic and enhypostatic facets of Christ’s humanity may prove helpful here. His humanity does not exist as an independent person (that is, it is anhypostatic in itself) and only exists in the person of the Son (that is, it is enhypostatic upon the assumption). Westminster provides categories for this nuance: ‘Christ, in the work of mediation, acteth according to both natures; by each nature doing that which is proper to itself.’46 This helps us appreciate Luke 1.35 saying two things of this virgin-born son: he is ‘called holy’, and he is ‘son of God’. As the divine Son, he has been righteous forever; as the human son of Mary, he has been made holy ‘by the power of the Most High’. Further, there is every reason to confess that this sanctification of his human nature took place at the very moment of his conception. Citing Luke 1.35, John Owen comments: ‘For the pollution of our nature, it was prevented in him from the instant of conception … He was “made of a woman” [Gal. 4.4]; but that portion whereof he was made was sanctified by the Holy Ghost, that what was born thereof should be a holy thing.’47 This specification that the Spirit worked This claim contra Kevin Hector’s argument in ‘Actualism and Incarnation: The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8 (2006): 307–22. 45 For further argument toward a Spirit Christology that extends rather than usurps Nicaea and Chalcedon, see R. Michael Allen, The Christ’s Faith: A Dogmatic Account (T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology; London: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 135–42. The great example in this regard, however, is the seventeenth-century theologian John Owen, especially his Trinitarian texts Christologia and Pneumatologia. 46 ‘Westminster Confession of Faith’, in Creeds of the Churches, p. 205 (VIII.7). 47 John Owen, Communion with the Triune God, Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor (eds), (Wheaton: 44

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a miracle at the point of the virginal conception such that Mary’s flesh was not received by the Son as sinful or fallen flesh means that language of Christ being kept from fallen flesh should be used here.48 It is for people like us, thus Christ must have assumed flesh like ours. But it is good news, thus Christ must have sanctified our flesh and done so all the way from his first moment of human life onward to glory. Here we must note that some, such as Edward Irving, have taken the language of the fallen human nature of Christ to suggest not only that he was born of a fallen human mother, but that his own substance was fallen.49 Irving’s intent was surely to honour the union between Christ and humanity, but his approach is disastrous. Christ in this depiction is not only amidst us, but he is one of us in ways that are both authentically human (traits rooted in creation) but also in accidents of history (distortions rooted in the fall). Irving offers an account of the sustaining of Christ’s humanity (such that the Spirit keeps it from acting sinfully moment by moment), but not of the sanctification or transformation of it (such that it is, in substance, sinless, unfallen, and holy). It is this sanctification of human flesh – in this time after the fall and in this place east of Eden, a fallen nature – that is enacted by the Spirit and is crucial for the economy of God’s new covenant (Heb. 7.27-28; 9.7, 14). Otherwise, the Son’s human will would be sinful and lead him into sin and thus render him incapable of being a high priest, much less a sacrifice for sin. Obviously this would be catastrophic. Not only that but even the possession of a fallen nature would be culpable, for the very existence of a depraved will or nature is itself heinous to God our Heavenly Father. Either sin in character or in action would render him privy to the limits of the old priesthood, which was divinely given, useful for a time, but ultimately ineffectual in the face of our profound need for final atonement. But this counterfactual need not detain us, for the apostles point us in a different direction. This second Adam never submitted his will to the allure of temptation and was never himself fallen, unholy or sinful. He was ‘sanctified’, ‘anointed’, and he was one ‘in whom it pleased the Father that all fullness should dwell’. Westminster opens to us the direction of a Spirit Christology that Crossway, 2007), p. 166 (italics in original). Indeed, such was the position of John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (John T. McNeill (ed.), Ford Lewis Battles (trans.) (Library of Christian Classics; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), p. 481 (II.xiii.4). 49 See C. G. Strachan, The Pentecostal Theology of Edward Irving (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1973), p. 27; for wider attestation in Irving’s corpus, see vol. 5 of The Collected Writings of Edward Irving, G. Carlyle (ed.) (London: Alexander Strahan, 1865). The critical analysis of Donald Macleod is particularly helpful in engaging not only the problematic approach of Irving, but also some of its effects in the work of Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance and James B. Torrance. See Macleod, The Person of Christ. Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), pp. 222–9. 48

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honours the integrity of Christ’s human nature, its dynamic sanctification by the Spirit (and not owing to some other source than God’s will), and the fact that this is not an alternative to but an augmentation of the claim that this one is himself ‘very God of very God’. He is born from the fallen flesh of Mary, and yet his human will and nature was sanctified by the very Spirit of God such that he does not have or possess a fallen human nature.50 While he is dust and does return to that mire, he is also ‘without sin’ or, in the language of Westminster, ‘holy, harmless, undefiled, and full of grace and truth’.51 Recent approaches to the question of Christ’s human nature are often viewed as dropping one or another facet of this teaching: On the one hand, those who seek to affirm that the Son assumed a fallen human nature (or sinful flesh) are often interpreted as sacrificing the sinlessness of Jesus and thus leaving believers still in need of a Savior. On the other hand, those who affirm that the Son assumes an unfallen human nature (cf., Adam prior to the fall) are often charged with presenting a generic Jesus who is not truly man, thus losing the soteriological significance of his life, death, resurrection and ascension.52

But the New Testament – in particular Hebrews – attests to his consubstantiality with us as well as his sanctification and even glorification by the Spirit. Dogmatics does well to attend to both affirmations deep within the apostolic witness. To honour these emphases at the same time, we argue that while the eternal Son assumed his nature from a fallen mother, he was never a sinner and never possessed a fallen human nature for his humanity was sanctified immediately by the Holy Spirit. In technical or scholastic terminology, we might say that the act of assumption, then, is from (a quo) but not of or to (ad quem) a fallen human nature (since the only fallen nature is that of his human mother, Mary). We might further say that the act of assumption is not from (a quo) but of and unto (ad quem) an unfallen human nature (since his human nature is always unfallen, pure, sinless).53 That his human nature comes from that of a fallen It should be observed that the Roman doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary leads, logically, to an infinite regress. One must ask: if a pure Christ cannot be born of a sinful mother, then why can that mother be born pure from her own sinful parents? In other words, while the immaculate conception may be argued for on the basis of exegetical parallels (Mary as the new temple or tabernacle), it certainly raises metaphysical and covenantal questions about what is possible: for the birth of Mary and of her son. 51 ‘Westminster Confession of Faith’, in Creeds of the Churches, p. 204 (VIII.3). 52 Kelly M. Kapic, ‘The Son’s Assumption of a Human Nature: A Call for Clarity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 3 (2) (2001): 154. 53 These distinctions between assumption a quo and ad quem were absent in my earlier account of this issue, found in The Christ’s Faith, pp. 126–35. 50

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human mother honours his commonality with those he will redeem. That his human nature itself is and always remains pure, holy, and unfallen preserves his moral and covenantal singularity. Both are essential if he is the focus of the gospel. The language of the Westminster Confession again proves helpful here: ‘The Son of God … did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties, and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin; being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance.’54 Note that the assumption (expressed with the claim ‘take up him’) includes all facets or ‘essential properties’ as well as those accidental realities due to sin which can be called ‘common infirmities thereof ’, with but one specific exception: ‘yet without sin’. Westminster specifically uses the language ‘of her substance’ to describe the origins of the Son’s human nature (a quo), but it also notes that the event of assumptive conception, by the Spirit’s power, terminated in (ad quem) the beginning of a life and a human nature that was ‘without sin’. The Son’s assumption was from a fallen human nature (that of Mary) but it was not of a fallen human nature (as his own substance was sanctified and, thus, pure, holy, and always unfallen). And this is soteriologically essential: the great High Priest comes from us but is not of our fallen condition; therefore, he may enter the holy of holies evermore to offer himself a pure sacrifice for sin and to intercede always on our behalf.

V By way of conclusion, we should note the way in which this argument has proceeded in contrast to many recent engagements. First, we have approached a thorny contemporary debate by way of setting the stage. Dogmatics is meant to enable exegesis to function well and, we might add, to lay the groundwork even for productive theological polemics (as was provoked in the nineteenth century by the work of Edward Irving). In many cases, this simply means that good theology forces the biblical interpreter or the polemicist to start back two or three steps and to take cognizance of the wider intellectual and canonical terrain when moving forward. This essay has considered four things – scriptural fittingness, the incarnational union, the humanity of Christ, and his relationship

‘Westminster Confession of Faith’, in Creeds of the Churches, p. 203 (VIII.2).

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to human sin – believing that though distinct, these items are related and are best considered in that sequence and order. In this short thought experiment, second, we have stayed close to the text of the Epistle to the Hebrews. This is not ornamental or merely illustrative. Christian reasoning regarding the person of Christ principally flows from biblical exegesis. Unfortunately, recent debates regarding the character of Christ’s humanity (whether fallen or unfallen) have tended to happen at great remove from the idiom and categories of Scripture. While we need not remain restricted to the lingo of the prophets and apostles alone – translation being essential to Christian intellectual and missional faithfulness – we do tend to see loss of both spiritual verve and of focused meaning when theological conversation occurs at too great a distance from that scriptural world. Third, we have regularly touched down and related our Christological argument to one of the most important touch points of Western Christian theology, namely, the Westminster Confession of Faith. It is merely one confessional example of biblical reasoning, but it has proven to be a decisive one in the last half-millennium (both inside and outside the ecclesiastical communions directly tied to its formal authority). Against the claims of some detractors of this confessional theology – ranging from the nineteenth-century voices of Edward Irving and John Macleod Campbell to the twentieth-century campaigns of T. F. Torrance and James B. Torrance55 – we have seen that the teachings of Westminster provide categories in which we are compelled to keep alive to the many-splendoured glory that Hebrews, and the wider apostolic witness, reveals of the incarnate Son and his priestly service on behalf of the fallen children of Adam. This confessional language keeps us alert to Hebrews’ teaching that while Jesus dwells in our midst, he does so in a manner unlike us: he is one holy by nature, not by grace. And from that nature he then shares grace with us, going so far as to share his own glory with his joint heirs. With respect to the topic of Christ and the plague of sin, this must be our final word: a word of shared glory by means of sin’s overcoming in the priestly ministry of the spotless Lamb of God.

These accounts also suffer from confusion of incarnation and atonement, as if the act of assumption or the mere existence of an incarnate God itself provides atonement for sinful humanity. Their logical and rhetorical tendency toward some version of universalism (though we must note that this is a tendency that is often explicitly denied by some of the aforementioned authors) flows from this incarnational approach to the atonement.

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Contributors R. Michael Allen is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Knox Theological Seminary. Christopher B. Ansberry is Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Oak Hill College. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt is Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland. C. Clifton Black is Otto A. Piper Professor of Biblical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Mark J. Boda is Professor of Old Testament at McMaster Divinity College. Gary M. Burge is Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and Graduate School. Jesse Couenhoven is Associate Professor of Moral Theology at Villanova University. Donald Fairbairn is Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity at GordonConwell Theological Seminary. Timothy G. Gombis is Associate Professor New Testament at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. Michael Graves is Armerding Professor of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College and Graduate School. George Hunsinger is Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. J. R. Daniel Kirk is Associate Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. Robert Kolb is Professor of Theology Emeritus at Concordia Seminary St Louis. Thomas H. McCall is Associate Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Alistair McFadyen is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of Leeds.

468 Contributors

Ian A. McFarland is Regis Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Jason McMartin is Associate Professor of Psychology and Theology at Biola University. David M. Moffitt is Senior Lecturer of New Testament at the University of St Andrews. Paul T. Nimmo is Chair in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. James R. Payton, Jr. is Professor of History at Redeemer University College. Stephen Ray is Neal F. and Ila A. Fisher Professor of Systematic Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Katherine Sonderegger is William Meade Professor of Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. Jay Sklar is Professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary. Kevin M. Vander Schel is a Catherine of Siena Fellow at Villanova University. Sylvia Walsh is Scholar in Residence at Stetson University. Jeremy J. Wynne is Lecturer in Theology at Whitworth University. Randall C. Zachman is Professor of Reformation Studies the University of Notre Dame.

Index al-Ghazali 327 Alexander of Hales 203 Annet, Peter 328 Anselm 203–4, 359, 396, 437 anxiety 267–8, 272–5 Aristotelian 200, 202, 216 Aristotle 150, 158, 199–200, 205, 208, 214, 392, 395, 453 Athanasius 46, 165–79, 388 atonement 15–19, 24–5, 76–7, 79–80, 92, 105, 115–19, 131, 140–7, 251, 269, 275, 281–2, 372, 411, 434, 462, 465 Attfield, David 338 Augustine 165, 181–98, 200, 202–4, 206, 208–14, 245, 247–8, 268, 305–11, 313–15, 317, 320, 340, 349, 353, 386–91, 393, 397, 399, 418, 429, 438–41 Augustinian 188, 200–2, 205–6, 208–10, 266, 274, 308, 311–13, 317, 386, 388–9, 429, 440 Bacon, Francis 363 Barth, Karl 285–99, 356–8, 369–70, 374, 378, 388, 395, 398, 440 Basil of Caesarea 388 Batka, L’ubomír 218 Behr, John 159 Berkeley, George 327 Berkouwer, G. C. 381 Biel, Gabriel 327 Boda, Mark 19–20 Bonaventure 455 bondage of the will 308 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 380 Bouteneff, Peter 161 Brown, Raymond E. 94 Brunner, Emil 356, 365–6 Bultmann, Rudolf 80, 90 Caird, George 413

Calvin, John 235–50, 354–5, 358–9, 397, 443, 456, 460 Campbell, John Macleod 465 Cappadocians 458, 460 Carson, D. A. 321–2 Cassuto, Umberto 8 causality 261–3, 439–41 Cobb, John 329 Collins, Anthony 328 Collins, James 10 corruption 51, 56, 74, 77, 95, 97, 101–2, 163, 169, 174–7, 183, 185–6, 217, 220, 237, 241–2, 244–5, 247–50, 258, 268, 279, 289–90, 293, 354, 363, 373, 385–6, 398–9, 418, 428–30, 438–41, 443 creation 167–71 Cyril of Alexandria 455, 457, 460 Davis, Stephen T. 330 Day of Atonement 5, 77 death 222–3, 385–99 deism 328–9 disobedience 8, 10, 22, 24, 63, 72, 97, 131, 159, 161–3, 170, 187, 204, 217, 222–3, 225, 240–1, 278, 288–90, 292, 294, 304–5, 309–10, 387, 447 divine goodness 322–3 Dunn, James D. G. 102 Edwards, Jonathan 327–8 enslavement 100–1, 106, 115, 117, 192, 407 estrangement 4, 8, 239, 442–3, 448 evil 8, 10–11, 20, 27, 29, 36, 48, 50, 52, 55–6, 59, 62–3, 71, 75, 78, 94–5, 101–3, 115, 118–20, 123, 182–86, 206–7, 258–61 Evodius 353 faith 281–3 fall 158–62, 167–71, 186–91, 239–44

470 Index Farley, Edward 420 Ferguson 418–19 finitude 385–99 Fishbane, Michael 137 Forbes, Chris 406 Forde, Gerhard 382 forgiveness 5, 20, 63, 73–9, 88–9, 91–2, 116–18, 192, 197, 230–1, 279–83, 287, 289–90, 434, 437 Francis of Assisi 397 Freddoso, Alfred J. 334 freedom of the will 132–4, 247–50, 311–18, 337–50 Freud, Sigmund 360 Frost, Robert 385, 387

inclinations 134–6 iniquity 4–5, 18–20, 32, 37, 39–40, 52, 62, 77, 86, 131, 146, 174, 242, 244, 443 injustice 35–42, 48, 51, 54, 57, 59, 62, 221, 241, 260, 309, 320, 382, 402, 433, 435–7, 442–8 intentional sin 17, 94, 131, 249, 259 Irenaeus 149–63, 165, 167 Irving, Edward 462, 464–5

Gorman, Michael 105 Gossett, Thomas F. 422 Greene, Roger 80 Gregory of Nyssa 388 Griffin, David Ray 329 guilt 3–4, 17–20, 32–3, 38, 49, 52, 75, 81, 83–4, 91, 115–16, 118, 125, 141–2, 161–2, 176, 181, 192–3, 211, 222–3, 225, 230, 236, 242–3, 246, 252, 256, 257, 261, 272–3, 281–2, 288–9, 292, 312, 321, 330, 342, 388–90, 407–8, 436, 441, 444–5

Kant, Immanuel 362, 392 Käsemann, Ernst 90 Katz, Steven T. 145 Keener, Craig 84 Kelsey, David H. 440 Kierkegaard, Søren 267–83, 310, 439 King, Martin Luther 206 Kors, Alan Charles 328 Kuyper, Abraham 355–6

Haenchen, Ernst 90 Hallam, Arthur 398 Harrison, Peter 363 Hart, David Bentley 322, 335 Hatch, W. H. P. 84 Hays, Richard B. 101, 376 Hegel, G. F. W. 270, 272, 398 Heidegger, Martin 397 Hengel, Martin 375 Herbert of Cherbury 328 Hoffman, Lawrence 140 Horton, Michael 440 human nature 239–44 human responsibility 321–2 Husserl, Edmund 361 idolatry 6, 30, 34, 41, 57, 64, 99 Ignatius of Antioch 149 imago Dei 155–8, 238–9 impurity 6, 38, 100, 116–18

Jefferson, Thomas 328 Jesus Christ 153–5, 177–8, 451–65 John of Damascus 319, 325–6, 335 judgment 369–84 Justin Martyr 149

Lactantius 382 lawlessness 63, 93, 175, 303, 387 Leibniz, Gottfried 391–2 Lewis, C. S. 321, 334 Luther, Martin 217–33, 240, 269, 351, 353–5 Macrina 388 Maimonides 133 Malebranche, Nicholas 327 Marx, Karl 360 Mays, James 371 McFague, Sallie 394 McFarland, Ian 337 McGrath, Alister 363 Melanchthon, Philip 226 Melito of Sardis 149 Memling, Hans 380 merit 142–3 Miller, Jean Baker 447 Milton, John 191 Molina, Luis de 331, 336 monocausality 325–8

Index Moroney, Stephen 365–7 Moser, Paul 358, 366 Muller, Richard A. 319 Niebuhr, H. Richard 318 Niebuhr, Reinhold 310, 398, 417, 429, 439 Nietzsche, Friedrich 360–1 occasionalism 327–8 omnicausality 325–7 original justice 203–4 original sin 138–41, 161, 192–6, 203–5, 218–21, 256–8, 268–70, 303–18 Owen, John 354, 359, 461 Pelagian 190, 194–5, 264, 266, 386–90 Pelagianism 268, 399 Pelagius 165, 190, 241, 268, 305–6, 342, 386–90 Peter Abelard 211 Peter Lombard 200, 203 Plantinga, Alvin 357–8, 440 Plantinga, Cornelius 9, 60, 320, 342 Plato 169, 206, 392, 425 Platonic 171, 203, 455 Platonism 454 Platonists 391 Plotinus 387 Polycarp of Smyrna 151 powers 295–7, 401–16, 426–31 Process theology 329–30 providence 319–36 punishment 141–3 race 419–21 Rahner, Karl 397 reason 351–68 rebellion 6, 12, 13, 22, 24, 34, 50, 52–3, 60, 64 Reno, R. R. 379 repentance 15–16, 23, 28–9, 33–4, 43, 46, 64, 66, 69, 72–3, 79–80, 136, 143–5, 147, 177, 217, 224, 226, 229–32, 248, 275, 279, 281–2, 377, 437, 449 repristination 162–3 reward 141–3 Romero, Oscar 446 rule of faith 152–3, 217

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Sartre, Jean-Paul 361 Satan 221–2, 408–11 Sauter, Gerhard 370 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 251–66, 271, 440–1, 460 Schlier, Heinrich 404 Schnackenburg, Rudolf 89 self-righteousness 69, 437 Sharp, Gene 446 sickness 72, 146, 186, 194, 402 simul justus et peccator 230–3 sin archetypal 138–41 as despair 275–9 enigma of 270–2 as fault 131 and God’s gifts 245–7 as iniquity 131 as invention of evil 171–4 knowledge of 286–8 as moral language 340–3 noetic effects of 352–68 as nothingness 292–4 as omission 201–2 ontology of 291–4 as opposition to grace 252 origin of 255–6, 439–41 and self-knowledge 236–9 as sickness 48–9, 60, 267, 275–6, 281 as structure 417–32 and victim 433 sinner 288–91 Stump, Eleonore 331 substitution 145–7 Tennyson, Alfred 398 theodicy 184–6 theological method 149–50, 199–200, 253–4 Theophilus of Antioch 149 Thomas Aquinas 199–216, 320, 326–7, 331, 351, 359, 392, 394, 453 Tillich, Paul 310, 393, 398 Tindal, Matthew 328 Toland, Matthew 328 Torah 136 Torrance, James B. 465 transgression 4–5, 18–19, 49, 52, 55, 58, 61, 69, 131, 135, 141, 145, 174, 177,

472 Index 206, 209, 218, 226, 250, 255, 289, 305, 405–6, 408 Travis, Stephen 381 unbelief 80, 82, 84, 94, 114, 165–6, 219, 222, 240, 288, 289, 351, 359, 442 unintentional sin 5, 14–17, 131, 259

Westphal, Merold 352, 360–4, 367 wickedness 5, 11–12, 40, 55, 57, 62–3, 73, 101 Williams, Michael D. 14 Wink, Walter 416 Woolston, Thomas 328 wrath, 222–3, 369–84

Volf, Miroslav 376

Zwingli, Huldrych 325–8