Tag Archive - sin

What is Sin?

October 5, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

“What is sin?”

When this question was put to our church last Sunday night, I was bemused to discover that my mouth went into auto-pilot with the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “Sin is any want of conformity to, or transgression of, the law of God.”

In the brief compass of the conversation I had with the person sitting next to me, I spoke those words but then retracted them based on my no longer believing that some trans-historical Law governs the entire universe.

In the teaching time itself, it was suggested that sin can be thought of as anything that fails to be conducive to the shalom of God.

I think there’s something to that.

Sin is not just about breaking rules, it is also about failing to live up to obligations to love. And the idea of shalom holistic order in life, not merely absence of conflict, helps send our vision beyond simply our posture toward God and encompasses our posture toward the entirety of God’s world.

We can even begin to talk about sin as a power that wages war against the shalom of God, and the shalom of humanity, in innumerable ways.

And all this is important.

When sin is simply law-breaking, then a sin-solution will focus simply on judicial restoration.

But when sin is a holistic failure of life in this world to thrive as God intends, then the sin-solution will have to be an all-encompassing act that not only forgives sin but also restores our lives, and the world itself, to newness, making us not only participants in, but also agents of, the new creation.

Having our minds around the idea of sin is important–not for the purpose of making ourselves sin-obsessed, introspective Puritan types. Knowing the pervasiveness of sin (of the lack of God-intended order upon the earth) is important so that we don’t under-sell the work that God has done in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Freedom for a Real God

June 24, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts, Church with 7 Comments

Two points in Karl Barth’s articulation of the Spirit’s revelation of the Word of God to humanity deserve fresh hearing in a world that tends to go a very different direction.

One of these is the issue of freedom. I find that human freedom is one of the bedrock assumptions that most of my students bring to the text of scripture with them. Sometimes this is couched in terms of “free will” as over against a “predestinarian” understanding of how we come to be in relationship with God. But often it is not so specifically developed.

What my students assume, by and large, is that we are free, as humans, to choose for God or to choose against God as God is offered to us in Christ.

Barth Experiences God Via His Pipe

Barth challenges this assumption on any number of levels. The idea that humanity is capable due to its own ontology to respond to God is an idea he confronts, insisting that the freedom we have to be for God is the freedom which God Himself gives us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

I think Barth is picking up on a crucial thread of biblical teaching.

These days we are increasingly happy with the “atonement model” of Christus Victor. At the root of this vision of salvation is a recognition that the world is enslaved to hostile powers. Paul talks about the world being subjected to the powers of sin and death.

Christ comes to redeem.

Look at the language. Enslavement. Subjection. Redemption.

The assumption in each of these is that we are not free except insofar as we participate in the freeing act of Christ. We need to rethink what sort of freedom we do and do not have inside and outside of Christ. I don’t think that a classic Calvinist articulation is necessarily the way to go, but it is on to something.

The other place where Barth has something to remind us of is that this God for whom we are freed by the power of the Spirit is a true God who is outside ourselves.

I had a conversation once that went something like this:

  • “I spend time reading the Bible and praying in the morning.”
  • “That’s great that you clear out time for yourself. I wish I did that more.”

Without bringing too much theological critique to bear on this normal conversation, it was reflective of two very different views of the world.

I believe that when I pray and read scripture I am actually spending time with a true God and subjecting my life to, or summoning the aid of, the true Lord who reigns over the earth.

Barth reminds us that Christian celebration of the experience of the Spirit is not a celebration of our own spirits, or of finding a lost place inside of ourselves. It is the Holy Spirit of God uniting us to the Word of God who is Jesus Christ.

Good words of challenge from Church Dogmatics ยง16.2.

Sin Versus Suffering?

January 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Quotes with 17 Comments

I know, I know. I shouldn’t have done it.

I got grumpy and shouldn’t have responded.

But I did.

What can I say? The Tweet got my dander up.

Here’s the offending member: “Those who see suffering (not sin) as the problem in life will be angry at God and complain continually to others.”

There has been a lot of conversation in evangelical circles over the past five or ten years, stretching conversation, that has helped us expand our horizons, develop a concept of the gospel that is bigger than simply forgiveness of sins.

The good news is good news to us because Jesus comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

And suffering is where the curse is found.

And sin is where the curse is found.

And slavery is where the curse is found.

And social exclusion is where the curse is found.

As the Twitter conversation unfolded, I was assured that Jesus ultimately “corrected” the views of those who came to him for relief from suffering–by dying for their sins.

But I’m sure that his healing of the hemorrhagic woman was the good news for her. I’m sure that the freeing of the woman bound by Satan for eighteen years was good news for her. I’m sure that healing, cleansing, and restoring the lepers to community was good news to them.

In short, I’m sure that Mark 1-13, 16 is as much the gospel as Mark 14-15. When the reign of God has come near, the people of the world flourish, discovering that God has come to take the world in all its disorder, brokenness, and sin–and create order, wholeness, and forgiveness.

Suffering is not the whole problem, but it might be the problem by which you are made aware–that the world as it is is not the world as God intends it to be and for God to be the good God and sovereign over all this all must change.

Behold, he must make all things new. To experience suffering in faith is not to become a whiner–it is to take our stand with the the world in its corruption and cry out to the Lord of all that all is not right, and to join with the Spirit and the Bride in saying, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

Sin, Brokenness, & Enslavement

August 4, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

Once upon a time, I was having a conversation with She Who Is More Learned Than I, and She made a comment about the prevalence of the language of “brokenness” these days–an abundance of use that has come at the expense of the language of “sin”.

More recently, I have been working in two areas at once. On the one hand, I have been teaching a class on the cross in the New Testament. Part of this course is working through various models of the atonement, studying how they conceive of the problem of sin and how Jesus’ death provides the solution.

On the other hand, I have been writing about sex and homosexuality for my book on Jesus and Paul. Doing this, I was struck by the way that much contemporary conversation about sexuality has distanced sexual practice from something that might be labeled “sinful” (except in cases of rape, pedophilia, etc.).

And so studying sexuality reaffirmed to me the importance of what I learned in talking to my colleagues and in studying atonement theories: In order to articulate a Christian position on any issue, including sex, we have to work with multiple metaphors.

When we look at atonement theories, these are some of the things we hear:

  1. The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many. “Ransom” language imagines us as enslaved to a hostile power.
  2. By His stripes we are healed. “Healing” language imagines us as wounded or broken and in need of mending.
  3. Blood poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. “Forgiveness” language imagines us as guilty.

I think the point is this: we are doing well in evangelicalism these days spreading our wings and attempting to fly with a broader array of images about atonement. This opens the door for us to recognize more broadly the effects of sin and thereby celebrate more fully the redeeming work of Christ that delivers us from all sin’s effects. He frees us from our slavery. He heals us from our brokenness. He forgives us for our sins.

But once we’ve so expanded our vision of what living in a sinful world entails, we are confronted simultaneously with the various ways that we need all of Christ in every area of our lives.

If we have anger problems, that not only means we have guilt in our anger that needs to be forgiven, but likely some brokenness in our way of responding to the world and woundedness in our hearts that need to be healed before we can respond to our world with grace and patience. Moreover, if we have such a problem there is a power working to enslave us to this sinful passion from which we need to be freed.

And so I make the modest suggestion that when we deal with sex as a particular issue, we must anticipate that we will see evidence of sinful expressions that need to be forgiven, seemingly inescapable desires from which we need to be freed, and driving forces in broken and wounded hearts and bodies that need to be healed.

To claim that God is not concerned with what we do sexually is to revert to an insufficiently physical gnosticism. To cordon off sex from the realm of our humanity possibly marred by sin is to insufficiently recognize both the need for and extent of Christ’s atoning work.