Sin

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

The fire of lust's pleasures must be fought with the fire of God's pleasures. If we try to fight the fire of lust with prohibitions and threats alone — even the terrible warnings of Jesus — we will fail. We must fight it with a massive promise of superior happiness. We must swallow up the little flicker of lust's pleasure in the conflagration of holy satisfaction… Our aim is not only to avoid something erotic but also to gain something excellent.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met.

This is no way to run a farm. Maybe Jesus was just not as good a gardener as he was a carpenter... Programs designed to get rid of evil are doomed to do exactly what the farmer suggests they will do. Since good and evil commonly inhabit not only the same field but even the same individual human beings, the only result of a dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.

I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though they ...have killed off more people than all other people put together. Yet I cannot be sure they don't have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellent precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise the truth? One might even become a Christian if there were few if any Christians around.

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.

Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

Mr. Allnut: A man takes a drop too much once in a while; it's only human nature. Rose Sayer: Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

The Bible's purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible's purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome... religion is 'if you obey, then you will be accepted'. But the Gospel is, 'if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey'. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.

The Lord has taken away your sin; you are not going to die.

Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.

Twas battered and scarred, and the auctioneer thought it scarcely worth his while to waste much time on the old violin, but held it up with a smile; "What am I bidden, good folks," he cried, "Who'll start the bidding for me?" "A dollar, a dollar"; then two!" "Only two? Two dollars, and who'll make it three? Three dollars, once; three dollars twice; going for three.." But no, from the room, far back, a gray-haired man came forward and picked up the bow; Then, wiping the dust from the old violin, and tightening the loose strings, he played a melody pure and sweet as caroling angel sings. The music ceased, and the auctioneer, with a voice that was quiet and low, said; "What am I bid for the old violin?" And he held it up with the bow. A thousand dollars, and who'll make it two? Two thousand! And who'll make it three? Three thousand, once, three thousand, twice, and going and gone," said he. The people cheered, but some of them cried, "We do not quite understand what changed its worth." Swift came the reply: "The touch of a master's hand." And many a man with life out of tune, and battered and scarred with sin, Is auctioned cheap to the thoughtless crowd, much like the old violin, A "mess of pottage," a glass of wine; a game - and he travels on. "He is going" once, and "going twice, He's going and almost gone." But the Master comes, and the foolish crowd never can quite understand the worth of a soul and the change that's wrought by the touch of the Master's hand. Myra 'Brooks' WelchKindly contributed by:

Cheap grace means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as general truth...an intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross. Costly grace is the gospel. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son...it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life. Costly Grace is the incarnation of God... When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. That is why the rich young man was so loath to follow Jesus, for the cost of His following was the death of his will. In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts.

Because I longed for eternal life, I went to bed with harlots and drank for nights on end. I slept in bliss, but awoke with the bitter taste of the mortal state.

My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

We read in Genesis 5:5 that 'Adam ... died.' Why did he die? What was the origin of death? Was it there from the beginning? Certainly vegetable death was. God created 'seed-bearing plants ... that bear fruit with seed in it' (Gn. 1:lff.). That is, the cycle of blossom, fruit, seed, death and new life was established in the created order. Animal death existed too, for many fossils of predators have been found with their prey in their stomach. But what about human beings? Paul wrote that death entered the world through sin (Rom. 5:12). Does that mean that, if he had not sinned, he would not have died? Many ridicule this notion. 'Obviously', writes C. H. Dodd with great self- confidence, 'we cannot accept such a speculation as an account of the origin of death, which is a natural process inseparable from organic existence in the world we know ...'(1) We have already agreed that death is 'a natural process' in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. But we must not think of human beings as merely rather superior animals, who on that account die like animals. On the contrary, it is because we are not animals that Scripture regards human death as unnatural, an alien intrusion, the penalty for sin, and not God's original intention for his human creation. Only if Adam disobeyed, God warned him, would he 'surely die' (Gn. 2:17). Since, however, he did not immediately die, some conclude that it was spiritual death, or separation from God, which was meant. But when God later pronounced his judgment on Adam, he said to him, 'Dust you are, and to dust you will return' (Gn. 3:19). So physical death was included in the curse, and Adam became mortal when he disobeyed. Certainly the Rabbis understood Genesis in this way. For example, 'God created man for incorruption, and made him an image of his own proper being; but by the envy of the devil death entered into the world...'(Wisdom 2:23f.). This is why the biblical authors lament death, and are outraged by it. They see it as demoting us, levelling us down to the animal creation, so that we (God's special creation) have become 'like the beasts that perish' (Ps. 49:12). The author of Ecclesiastes feels the indignity of it too: 'Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal' (Ec. 3:19). It appears, therefore, that for his unique image-bearers God originally had something better in mind, something less degrading and squalid than death, decay and decomposition, something which acknowledged that human beings are not animals. Perhaps he would have 'translated' them like Enoch and Elijah, without the necessity of death. Perhaps he would have 'changed' them 'in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye', like those believers who will be alive when Jesus comes (1 Cor. 15:51f.). Perhaps too we should think of the transfiguration of Jesus in this light. His face shone, his clothing became dazzling white, and his body translucent like the resurrection body he would later have. Because he had no sin, he did not need to die. He could have stepped straight into heaven without dying. But he deliberately came back in order of his own free and loving will to die for us. (1) C. H. Dodd, "The Epistle of Paul to the Romans", The Moffatt New Testament Commentary (Hodder and Stoughton, llth edn. 1947), p. 81.

What we are (our self or personal identity) is partly the result of the Creation (the image of God), and partly the result of the fall (the image defaced). The self we are to deny, disown, and crucify is our fallen self, everything within us that is incompatible with Jesus Christ (hence Christ's command, 'let him deny himself and follow me'). The self we are to affirm and value is our created self, everything within us that is compatible with Jesus Christ (hence his statement that if we lose ourselves by self-denial we shall find ourselves). True self-denial (the denial of our false, fallen self) is not the road to self-destruction, but the road to self-discovery. So, then, whatever we are by creation, we must affirm: our rationality, our sense of moral obligation, our masculinity and femininity, our aesthetic appreciation and artistic creativity, our stewardship of the fruitful earth, our hunger for love and community, our sense of the transcendent mystery of God, and our inbuilt urge to fall down and worship him. All this is part of our created humanness. True, it has all been tainted and twisted by sin. Yet Christ came to redeem and not destroy it. So we must affirm it. But whatever we are by the fall, we must deny or repudiate: our irrationality; our moral perversity; our loss of sexual distinctives; our fascination with the ugly; our lazy refusal to develop God's gifts; our pollution and spoliation of the environment; our selfishness, malice, individualism, and revenge, which are destructive of human community; our proud autonomy; and our idolatrous refusal to worship God. All this is part of our fallen humanness. Christ came not to redeem this but to destroy it. So we must deny it.

It is fashionable nowadays to regard the biblical story of Adam and Eve as 'myth' (whose truth is theological but not historical), rather than 'significant event' (whose truth is both). Many people assume that evolution has disproved and discarded the Genesis story as having no basis in history. Since 'Adam' is the Hebrew word for 'man', they consider that the author of Genesis was deliberately giving a mythical account of human origins, evil and death. We should certainly be open to the probability that there are symbolical elements in the Bible's first three chapters. The narrative itself warrants no dogmatism about the six days of creation, since its form and style suggest that it is meant as literary art, not scientific description. As for the identity of the snake and the trees in the garden, since 'that old serpent' and 'the tree of life' reappear in the book of Revelation, where they are evidently symbolic, it seems likely that they are meant to be understood symbolically in Genesis as well. But the case with Adam and Eve is different. Scripture clearly intends us to accept their historicity as the original human pair. For the biblical genealogies trace the human race back to Adam; Jesus himself taught that 'at the beginning the Creator "made them male and female"' and then instituted marriage (Mt. 19:4ff., quoting Gn. 1:27). Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God had made every nation 'from one man' (Acts 17:26); and in particular Paul's carefully constructed analogy between Adam and Christ depends for its validity on the equal historicity of both. He affirmed that Adam's disobedience led to condemnation for all, as Christ's obedience led to justification for all (Rom. 5:18). Moreover, nothing in modern science contradicts this. Rather the reverse. All human beings share the same anatomy, physiology and chemistry, and the same genes. Although we belong to different so-called 'races' (Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid and Australoid), each of which has adjusted to its own physical environment, we nevertheless constitute a single species, and people of different races can intermarry and interbreed. This homogeneity of the human species is best explained by positing our descent from a common ancestor. 'Genetic evidence indicates', writes Dr Christopher Stringer of London's Natural History Museum, 'that all living people are closely related and share a recent common ancestor.' He goes on to express the view that this common ancestor 'probably lived in Africa' (though this is not proved) and that from this ancestral group 'all the living peoples of the world originated'.(1)

This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.

We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.

The human spirit will not even begin to try and surrender self-will as long as all seem to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt…And pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

They [Adam and Eve] wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.

Now what was the sort of "hole" man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor ---- that is the only way out of a "hole." This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern ---- is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death... Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.1 C.S.

... I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless. CS Lewis- THE PROBLEM OF PAIN “Human Pain”

There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all. Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan's pride and murmuring against God.

And, will you believe it, one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration… I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realize I am really thinking how frightfully clever I am going to be and how he will admire me… And then you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It's like fighting the hydra.

The point of the Bible is that God continually and persistently works with and gives his grace to people who don't deserve it, don't even seek it and don't appreciate it once they get it. The point of the Bible is that the best people who have ever lived have not and will not cannot overcome their own sin and flaws and self centeredness but if they cling to the grace of God to the end of their lives, they will triumph. That's the point of Bible.

The Lord has taken away your sin; you are not going to die.

The longer you delay, the more your sin gets strength and rooting. If you cannot bend a twig, how will you be able to bend it when it is a tree?

The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it’s God’s Son who pays the price?….

‘You ought to begin to understand, Frodo, after all you have heard,’ said Gandalf. ‘He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it. He had no will left in the matter.

Give it back to Sméagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end.

but for the most part they fell into evils and follies. Many became enamoured of the Darkness and the black arts; some were given over wholly to idleness and ease, and some fought among themselves, until they were conquered in their weakness by the wild men.

“The United States has a drug problem and a high school sex problem

and a welfare problem and an AIDS problem and a rape problem. None of this will go away until more people in positions of responsibility are willing to come forward and explain, in frankly moral terms, that some of the things people do nowadays are wrong.”

For, unlike some other identifications of human trouble, a diagnosis of sin and guilt allows hope. Something can be done for this malady. Something has been done for it.

My goal, then, is to renew the knowledge of a persistent reality that used to evoke in us fear, hatred, and grief. Many of us have lost this knowledge, and we ought to regret the loss. For slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but it is also devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system.

What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint. Introduction Page 1 · Location 168 In pondering the twenty-third psalm, Joseph Sittler once observed that though we walk through the valley of death just once, we spend our whole lives in the valley of the shadow of death. Middle-aged people notice that shadow more often than they used to. Page 2 · Location 178 The whole range of human miseries, from restlessness and estrangement through shame and guilt to the agonies of daytime television —all of them tell us that things in human life are not as they ought to be. Page 2 · Location 184 The reason is that sin distorts our character, a central feature of our very humanity. Sin corrupts powerful human capacities —thought, emotion, speech, and act —so that they become centers of attack on others or of defection or neglect.

Instead, our victims face us indignantly. For they know we have violated them with something powerfully and peculiarly personal. We have willingly hurt them. We have done it on purpose. Sin outstrips other human troubles by perverting special human excellences. When people devise and defend high-minded political fraud, when a musician feels a spasm of happy satisfaction over the sour review of a colleague’s recital, when a drug dealer wants and plans

In fact, sin typically both causes and results from misery.

Accordingly, Christians have always measured sin, in part, by the suffering needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of a body on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the urgency of the summons to human beings to ally themselves with the events of Christ and with the person of these events, and then to make that person and those events the center of their lives —these things tell us that the main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.

The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it —both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways. Sinful life, as Geoffrey Bromiley observes, is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. CHAPTER 1 - Vandalism of Shalom

But resistance to redemption counts as sin, too, and often displays a special perversity.

Criminal and moral misadventures qualify as sin because they offend and betray God.

All sin has first and finally a Godward force. Let us say that a sin is any act —any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed —or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame.

11 Let us add that the disposition to commit sins also displeases God and deserves blame, and let us therefore use the word sin to refer to such instances of both act and disposition. 12 Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God.

God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be blame. In In short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking.

This is where the definition comes in. “Culpable disturbance of shalom” suggests that sin is unoriginal, that it disrupts something good and harmonious, that (like a housebreaker) it is an intruder, and that those who sin deserve reproach.

To get our bearings, we need to see first that sin is one form of evil (an agential and culpable form) and that evil, in turn, is the disruption or disturbance of what God has designed.

Sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and assaults what God has made. Sexism and racism, for example, show contempt both for various human persons and also for the mind of God.

In sum, shalom is God’s design for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and therefore an affront to their architect and builder.

Still, the two evils remain distinct because sin is a spiritual and moral evil and disease a physical one. Sin makes us guilty while disease makes us miserable. We thus need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases. 21

The reason in both cases is that by flouting the deliverances of his own conscience, a person breaks trust with God. For by doing what he thinks is wrong, a person does what he thinks will grieve God, and the willingness to grieve God by one’s acts is itself grievous. 23 Moreover, acting against one’s conscience blunts and desensitizes it; indeed, repeated thwarting of one’s conscience might eventually kill it. The subjective sinner therefore risks moral suicide.

All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. Acts are either right or wrong, either consonant with God’s will or not.

Involuntary sins are surprisingly common. For example, the traditional seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust) are usually involuntary. They are desires, beliefs, and attitudes over which a person may have little or, at best, only variable control. Faithful warriors against these sins thus experience familiar failures, slight improvements, backslidings, painful conquests, Pyrrhic victories, broken treaties, and humiliating compromises.

They are desires, beliefs, and attitudes over which a person may have little or, at best, only variable control. Faithful warriors against these sins thus experience familiar failures, slight improvements, backslidings, painful conquests, Pyrrhic victories, broken treaties, and humiliating compromises. The Scriptures claim that human beings need powerful outside intervention to control and eventually conquer their faults, but all veterans of the sin wars know this by personal experience as well.

What Jim Bob’s racism shows us is that moral evil is social and structural as well as personal: it comprises a vast historical and cultural matrix that includes traditions, old patterns of relationship and behavior, atmospheres of expectation, social habits.

Though we cannot always measure culpability for it, we do know that sin possesses appalling force. We know that when we sin, we pervert, adulterate, and destroy good things. We create matrices and atmospheres of moral evil and bequeath them to our descendants. By habitual practice, we let loose a great, rolling momentum of moral and spiritual evil across generations.

We create matrices and atmospheres of moral evil and bequeath them to our descendants. By habitual practice, we let loose a great, rolling momentum of moral and spiritual evil across generations. By doing such things, we involve ourselves deeply in what theologians call corruption. CHAPTER 2 - Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption

None of this would have surprised the church father Athanasius. According to him, human beings east of Eden corrupt everything they touch, competing with each other in lawlessness and in “devising all manner of new evils.” 37 In the works of Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and in classic Protestant confessional literature, corruption —an unhappy cluster of spiritual perversion, pollution, and disintegration —represents one of the two components of original sin (the other being guilt). In these sources, corruption and guilt present the problems that the gifts of sanctification and justification graciously address. According to Scripture, God’s original design included patterns of distinction and union and distinction-within-union that would give creation strength and beauty. In Genesis 1 and 2, God —who sometimes speaks there in tantalizing first-person plurals that helped kindle early Christian interest in the distinction-within-unity of the Holy Trinity —sets about to dig out oceans, build hills, plant forests, and stock lakes and streams. But the setting for these endeavors is a “formless void.” 38 Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cruisers. God orders things into place by sorting and separating them. At the same time God binds things together: he binds humans to the rest of creation as stewards and caretakers of it, to himself as bearers of his image, and to each other as perfect complements —a matched pair of male and female persons who fit together and whose fitting harmony itself images God. (Older translations of Gen. 2: 24 present the man as “cleaving” to the woman, a word that nicely suggests both distinction and union.)

Against this background of original separating and binding, we must see the fall as anti-creation, the blurring of distinctions and the rupturing of bonds, and the one as a result of the other. Thus, human beings who want to be “like God, knowing good and evil,” succeed only in alienating themselves from God and from each other. Even the good and fruitful earth becomes their foe (Gen. 3: 17-18; cf. 4: 12-14).

The flood is thus uncreation, “only the final stage in a process of cosmic disintegration which began in Eden.” 39

The story of the fall tells us that sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God had joined together and joins together what God had put asunder. Like some devastating twister, corruption both explodes and implodes creation, pushing it back toward the “formless void” from which it came.

Along the generations, human nature itself, with its vast and mysterious amalgam of capacities to think, feel, supervise, love, create, respond, and act virtuously —that is, with its vast capacities for imaging God —has become the main carrier and exhibit of corruption. Human nature, says the Formula of Concord, has been despoiled of its powers by original sin. The image suggested by this language is that of stripping —stripping a tree of its bark, an animal of its hide, or an enemy army of its arms and provisions. To do these things is to remove the skin that protects against outside invaders and keeps one’s innards from spilling out. In other words, to despoil is to remove that which preserves integrity. 40

Human nature, says the Formula of Concord, has been despoiled of its powers by original sin... To do these things is to remove the skin that protects against outside invaders and keeps one’s innards from spilling out. In other words, to despoil is to remove that which preserves integrity... Mockery takes dead aim at our staunchest natural defense and tries to blow it away. Mockery aims to shred human dignity and therefore to despoil its victim in a specially devastating way.

To despoil is to wreck integrity or wholeness, to strip away what holds a being together and what joins it to other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice, and delight. As Augustine shows in The City of God, sin despoils persons, groups, and whole societies. Corruption disturbs shalom —twisting, weakening, and snapping the thousands of bonds that give particular beings integrity and that tie them to others.

Corruption is thus a dynamic motif in the Christian understanding of sin: it is not so much a particular sin as the multiplying power of all sin to spoil a good creation and to breach its defenses against invaders. Corruption is spiritual AIDS —the mysterious, systemic, infectious, and progressive attack on our spiritual immune system that eventually breaks it down and opens the way for hordes of opportunistic sins. These make life progressively more miserable: conceit, for instance, typically generates envy of rivals, a nasty form of resentment that eats away at the envier. “Sin,” as Augustine says, “becomes the punishment of sin.” 42

“Sin,” as Augustine says, “becomes the punishment of sin.”

Reformation documents offer a number of images for corruption: it is a despoiled nature, a diseased root, a contaminated spring, a foul heart. 43 According to these documents, we are wrong at the core. A bad strain has gotten into the stock so that we now sin with the ease and readiness of people born to the task. After the fall we sin by second nature: we are “born sinners” as some folk are born athletes. This fact, empirical as well as biblical, lies behind a broad consensus on original sin. Although, partly because of the silence of Scripture, Christians of various theological orientations differ on central issues in the doctrine of original sin —for example, how a child acquires the fateful disposition to sin, whether this disposition is itself sin, how to describe and assess the accompanying bondage of the will44 —they agree on the universality, solidarity, stubbornness, and historical momentum of sin. That is to say, all serious Christians subscribe to the generic doctrine of corruption, the centerpiece of which is the claim that even when they are good in important ways, human beings are not sound.

That is why gluttony is a deadly sin: oddly, it is an appetite suppressant.

Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. Most broadly understood, perversion is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s project in the world: it is the diversion of construction materials for the city of God to side projects of our own, often accompanied by jerry-built ideologies that seek to justify the diversion.

Sometimes we pervert our own longings, aiming them at the wrong objects (as in sexual perversions) or indulging them disproportionately so that they become dull where God and the things of faith are concerned but acute where various genuine but only proximate goods such as money, knowledge, and power are concerned.

To pollute is to defile (the Latin roots of the word suggest dragging something through mud).

To pollute is to weaken a particular whole entity, such as a sound relationship, by introducing into it a foreign element.

(In this respect, pollution brings together what God wants kept asunder.) “Fooling around,” for example, pollutes both worship and marriage. Indeed, the biblical paradigm cases of pollution are idolatry and adultery, emblems of each other. In each case, some new commitment insinuates itself into an existing relationship and compromises

In idolatry a third party gets in between God and human persons, adulterating an exclusive loyalty. 58 Idolatry violates both negative and positive law, both the first commandment’s prohibition of idolatry (“ You shall have no other gods before me” [Deut. 5: 7]) and also the summary love command of the Deuteronomic code (“ Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” [6: 5]).

“ingratitude” or “perversity” or “discontent” or “stubbornness.”

These unhappy attitudes do break the summary law of love to God, but more basically they threaten the vital covenant relation.

Discontent, ingratitude, perversity, stubbornness —these attitudes and dispositions pollute filial loyalty to Israel’s Creator, Deliverer, and Keeper. Ungrateful and refractory people at once foul their own character and their relation to God. They are like a child —willful, resistant, and adroit in self-defense by appeal to various legalisms —to whom an exasperated parent finally says, “Don’t be that way!”

The image of pollution suggests bringing together what ought to be kept apart.

Scriptural writers fear “double-mindedness” not merely because it shows disloyalty and ingratitude but also because its perpetrator becomes its victim. Divided worship destroys worshipers. Divided love destroys lovers.

split the truly important longings and loyalties is to crack one’s own foundations and to invite the crumbling and, finally, the disintegration of life itself. A divided house cannot stand.

Disintegration is the main event in corruption —the breakdown of personal and social integrity, the loss of shape, strength, and purpose that make some entity an “entirety” and make it this entirety. 63 As Sylvia Fraser’s story reminds us, sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators. Disintegration is always deterioration, the prelude and postlude to death.

Like some mad charioteer, we now run our lives with more speed than direction. We become off-track racers, amateurs who have lost sight of the finish line. 66 Even in little ways we keep corrupting others and ourselves. Worse, unless arrested by the graces and disciplines of God, we tend to gather momentum in this program: sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.

Of course, sin ordinarily tries to bag a good of some kind: people want power or pleasure or wealth or self-esteem or happiness. Their sin consists in seeking these things in hurtful ways or excessively or preeminently or even exclusively. CHAPTER 4 - The Progress of Corruption

On the one hand, sin tends to despoil things. Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing “the very death of the soul.” 71 On the other hand, sin is remarkably generative: sin yields more and more sin.

On the other hand, sin is remarkably generative: sin yields more and more sin. In a standard scenario, each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.

Youngsters eventually discover what the wise have known for millennia: people rarely commit single sins. Thievery and lies and lies about lies, macho pride and mockery and assault, laziness and snappishness and cheating, and alcohol abuse that empties back into laziness —these sins and products of sin keep on replicating and bunching together like clusters of grapes on the vine. The clusters show up in individual persons but also in groups (in family systems, for instance) and in the places where groups and individuals meet. Hence the corruption of persons, of communities, and of whole cultures.

They knew that sin is both fatal and fertile.

Indeed, like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.

Despite centuries of war, no one has ever done it, he notes: nobody has ever fired a first shot. All strikes are claimed to be counterstrikes. All shots are return fire. “For the Allies, World War II began at the Polish border in 1939; for the Germans, hostilities dated back to Versailles. Your military operation is an attack; mine is a retaliation.“ 84

We know that where grievances are concerned people have long memories and short fuses. We know that injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful. We know that people who hate their lives often abuse those who incarnate what they hate and that the abused are then likely to abuse others. We know that nobody is more dangerous than a victim. We know that sin brings distress and that people often seek to relieve their distress with the same thing that brought it on —a dynamic, as we shall see in Chapter 8, that sin shares with addiction.

But anxiety, as Niebuhr observes, is only the context for sin, not its cause. Our base problem is unbelief. Failing to trust in the infinite God, we live anxiously, restlessly, always trying to secure and extend ourselves with finite goods that can’t take the weight we put on them.

Unbelief, says Niebuhr, yields anxiety, which yields alternating pride and sensuality.

Our core problem, says St. Augustine, is that the human heart, ignoring God, turns in on itself, tries to lift itself, wants to please itself, and ends up debasing itself. The person who reaches toward God and wants to please God gets, so to speak, stretched by this move, and ennobled by the transcendence of its object. But the person who curves in on himself, who wants God’s gifts without God, who wants to satisfy the desires of a divided heart, ends up sagging and contracting into a little wad. His desires are provincial. “There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.”

We still do not know why a person succumbs to the motive.

Environmental determinism and the no-fault morality that usually accompanies it are pretentious.

We do not finally know why evildoers do evil. At last the origin and explanation of human evil belong to what St. Paul calls “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2: 7, KJV).

sow a thought, and reap a deed; sow a deed, and reap another deed; sow some deeds, and reap a habit; sow some habits, and reap a character; sow a character, and reap two thoughts. 95 The new thoughts then pursue careers of their own, but they, plus their produce, also intersect and cross-fertilize with similar life cycles from hundreds and thousands of other persons. All these persons exist in families and other group systems that they influence and that influence them. Hence the progress of both good and evil is more like a spiral than a shuttle and, more than that, like waves of intertwined and self-replicating spirals.

And here our search runs into trouble, for the heart of even a pretty good person is divided. 99 An evil heart is a maze. In commenting on the overwhelming character pathology that psychiatrists have to struggle with in some patients, M. Scott Peck describes it as a “labyrinthine mass of lies and twisted motives and distorted communications.” 100 That’s just one patient. Let him and his kin, plus ordinary sinners and pretty good persons and everybody else, sow and reap and sow again; let them fertilize and cross-fertilize each other, and the resulting culture will defy rational analysis.

Ultimately, the only human beings we know are people who have been created to please God and build shalom but who, to a greater or lesser degree, mysteriously live against the purpose of their existence.

Chapter 1 we saw that sin qualifies as the worst of our troubles because, among other things, it corrupts what is peculiarly human about us. Sin attaches to intention, memory, thought, speech, intelligent action —to all the special features of personhood —and transforms them into weapons. CHAPTER 5 - Parasite

In general, good and evil grow together, intertwine around each other, and grow out of each other in remarkable and complicated ways.

Our inner lives are not partitioned like day and night, with pure light on one

side of us and total darkness on the other. Mostly, our souls are shadowed places; we live at the border where our dark sides block our light and throw a shadow over our interior places.... We cannot always tell where our light ends and our shadow begins or where our shadow ends and our darkness begins.

The same is true of certain emotions and states of mind. Anger, for example, can take the form of righteous indignation, a virtue of the just. Anger can also take the form of smoldering resentment of competitors, the vice of the envious.

According to traditional Christian wisdom, a main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace; in fact, pride hammers them flat and discards them.

Sin is deviant and perverse, an injustice or iniquity or ingratitude.

Exodus literature is disorder and disobedience. Sin is faithlessness, lawlessness, godlessness. Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it —both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a missing of the mark, a spoiling of goods, a staining of garments, a hitch in one’s gait, a wandering from the path, a fragmenting of the whole. Sin is what culpably disturbs shalom. Sinful human life is a caricature of proper human life.

So the biggest biblical idea about sin, expressed in a riot of images and terms, is that sin is an anomaly, an intruder, a notorious gate-crasher. Sin does not belong in God’s world, but somehow it has gotten in. In fact, sin has dug in, and, like a tick, burrows deeper when we try to remove it. 133 This stubborn and persistent feature of human sin can make it look as if it has a life of its own, as if it were an independent power or even a kind of person. Indeed, St. Paul uses language that suggests as much, as when he says that sin “exercised dominion in death” (Rom. 5: 21), that “sin deceived me and ... killed me” (7: 11), that “if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me” (7:

The reason is that sin is a parasite, an uninvited guest that keeps tapping its host for sustenance. Nothing about sin is its own; all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods. Sin is not really an entity but a spoiler of entities, not an organism but a leech on organisms. Sin does not build shalom; it vandalizes it. In metaphysical perspective, evil offers no true alternative to good, as if the two were equal and opposite qualities. “Goodness,” says C. S. Lewis, “is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.” 135 Here Lewis reproduces the old Augustinian idea that evil “has no existence except as a privation of good.” 136 Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive. To be successful, evil needs what it hijacks from goodness.

How peculiar, then, that sin multiplies right along with goodness. Faithful parents tend to reproduce themselves, but so do faithless ones. Generous acts congeal into character traits, but so do selfish ones. People who long for God want to satisfy their appetite and also to sharpen it, but the same is true of sex addicts.

Sin is fruitful just because, like a virus, it attaches the life force and dynamics of its host. 139 Sowing and reaping, human longing, children’s natural trust of their parents —such things belong among the springs and roots of a good creation. Sin does not remove these things; it attaches them and converts them to new uses. A faithful father, for instance, accepts his small daughter’s trust and love, strengthens them, and tries to extend them toward God and out toward the world. A sexually abusive father also accepts his daughter’s trust and love, but he uses them to bind his daughter to his lust. Sooner or later, he converts trust to fear and love to resentment. He strengthens these emotions with each episode of abuse, and, whether he wants to or not, may extend them toward God and out toward the world. The parasitic nature of sin accounts for the fruitfulness

But in a romantic, revolutionary frame of mind, we choose not to notice such fallout. When we thrill to demonic rebellion or cheer for fleeing bank robbers, we do not focus on any of the damage, disturbance, or offense. We notice only those features that sin has pirated from goodness —energy, imagination, persistence, and creativity. Everything sin touches begins to die, but we do not focus on that. We see only the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life. CHAPTER 6 - Masquerade

Vices have to masquerade as virtues —lust as love, thinly veiled sadism as military discipline, envy as righteous indignation, domestic tyranny as parental concern.

This infernal embarrassment (Satan must appeal to our God-given appetite for goodness in order to win his way) suggests a significant feature of evil: to prevail, evil must leech not only power and intelligence from goodness but also its credibility.

The heart of sin is rather the persistent refusal to tolerate a sense of sin, to take responsibility for one’s sin, to live with the sorrowful knowledge of it and to pursue the painful way of repentance. Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.

Likely she would add some comments on moral relativism and subjectivism: if no moral borders are objectively fixed, either culturally or personally, then the biblical concepts of transgression and shortcoming fade away. If moral lines keep moving, how will people know when they have overstepped a line or fallen short of one?

We prettify ugly realities and sell ourselves the prettified versions. Thus a liar might transform “I tell a lot of lies to shore up my pride” to “Occasionally, I finesse the truth in order to spare other people’s feelings.” We become our own dupes, playing the role of both perpetrator and victim. We know the truth —and yet we do not know it, because we persuade ourselves of its opposite. 158 We actually forget that certain things are wrong and that we have done them. To the extent that we are self-deceived, we occupy a twilight zone in which we make up reality as we go along, a twilight zone in which the shortest distance between two points is a labyrinth.

I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew afford no rational ground for disappointment. Of course if they do—if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge-player or the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner—then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question 'If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?' You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his head. He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

Ye who think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great, here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate. Mark the sacrifice appointed, see who bears the awful load; 'tis the Word, the Lord's Anointed, Son of Man and Son of God. Here we have a firm foundation, here the refuge of the lost: Christ's the Rock of our salvation, his the Name of which we boast. Lamb of God, for sinners wounded, sacrifice to cancel guilt; none shall ever be confounded, who on him their hope have built.

The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.

Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, 'The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.